Brains and Eggs

San Antonio judges mull later date for TX primary

2012-01-27T17:00:00.015-06:00

The three federal judges charged with drawing the maps that Texas will use in the 2012 primary elections pushed the date of those primaries later into April, and left uncertainty as to whether that would be final due to continuing questions swirling about the maps themselves.

After testimony from various parties -- Chad Dunn of the TDP, David Mattax for the TX OAG, attorneys for Reps. Joe Barton and Quico Canseco -- and a conference call with the judges in DC hearing the case over pre-clearance there, Justices Orlando Garcia, Xavier Rodriguez, and Jerry Smith finally put out of its misery the April 3rd unified primary date in their hearing which began at 1 p.m this afternoon.

There were some remarkable exchanges between the panel's judges and the Republican lawyers and representatives. Mattax at one point indicated that the judges did not have to 'get Section 5 (the pre-clearance provision) right', since the maps being drawn were interim ones anyway. Judge Rodriguez responded: "Are you saying you won't appeal our map if the DC court says something different on Section 5?"

Mattax' response: 'What I'm saying is the Section 5 conclusion doesn't have to be exactly the same, because the maps are just interim.'

Rodriguez: "Well, we thought we were just drawing interim maps the last time."

Judge Smith then asked David Mattax: "If the Supreme Court says that districts violate Section 5, how can we ignore that on interim maps?" Mattax replied: "Because they are only interim maps." Judge Smith: "I completely disagree that we can ignore (Section 5) concerns", and followed up with: "Doesn't the DC court's ruling already say Section 5 issues are not insubstantial?" Mattax responded that he did not think the SCOTUS ruling used the words 'not insubstantial'.

The conversation then turned back to settlement efforts. Mattax: 'We're going to work all weekend. Try to get something Monday.'

This is a good time to point out that about the time the hearing in San Antonio began, Gary Scharrer of the SAEN posted that the parties involved were negotiating a settlement.

A leading player in the state’s redistricting turmoil said this morning he’s hopeful that both sides are closing in on a settlement that will salvage Texas’ April 3 primary.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has been meeting with representatives of minority groups that sued the state last year to stop new political boundaries from taking effect on grounds the decade-long maps ignore profound population growth of minority Texans – mostly Hispanics.

“I am confident that the parties are working in good faith and have enough time to craft a compromise that will assure that the April primaries go on as scheduled,” said state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the House Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which is one of the parties suing the state.

Caught off guard as he was preparing for a 1 p.m. court hearing in San Antonio before three federal judges refereeing the redistricting fight, Martinez Fischer acknowledged that lawyers for his organization have been talking with Abbott and others in the case about a settlement. Martinez Fischer said he could not share details.

A spokesman for Abbott said the attorney general will hold off commenting until the court hearing.

Consensus seemed to emerge around 3:45 p.m. that everyone might come to an agreement on an April 17 unified primary -- two weeks later than currently scheduled -- contingent upon questions settled by the parties over the weekend. Judge Garcia directed the two sides to provide a list of the district maps not in dispute by Monday or Tuesday of next week "if you want to have an election in April."

When the conversation turned to military ballots (they have to be printed and mailed, thus requiring the most lead time of anything associated with an election), Steve Munisteri, chair of the Republican Party of Texas, responded that service members could be allowed to vote electronically and still satisfy the Texas Election Code's MOVE Act (Texas Insider has a nice, brief explanation in the first paragraph here). Judge Rodriguez was skeptical of that, and a moment later when Munisteri cited the TEC for not being able to move the conventions, the judge pounced.

"But you are asking us to change the MOVE Act. Why not just change the election code?"

The chairman said that Texas Republican voters would be disenfranchised by splitting the primary, moving the presidential part to the summer. "Why would you be OK with waiving certain parts of the election code but not others?" replied Rodriguez.

There was no indication from those present how Munisteri answered that question.

There followed more give-and-take between the litigants regarding the costs of splitting the primary, whether the state or other plaintiffs might or might not object to the forthcoming new maps, and more deep-in-the-weeds legal and political machinations. But the smirking was induced when Texas county election administrators began to testify, gently spiking the bad ideas from GOP redistricting lawyers and Munisteri by describing what would be able to functionally happen in their municipalities. The Bexar County elections official, for example, said that electronic ballots were not an option ... because they simply don't have email addresses for all service members.

Thanks to the Twitter feeds from the scene by Michael Li, Ross Ramsey, Nolan Hicks, Rebecca Acuna, Alana Rocha, and many others. You can read their play-play-play which I used to compose this post at the Twitter hashtag #txlege . Ramsey has his report up, likely with updates to come, and Kuffner has a bit more. Li's most recent Tweet, just before 5 p.m., says:

Probably pretty obvious but 2/1 filing deadline and ballot order draw next week are being cancelled.

The hearing continues; I'll post more updates as warranted.

Update: The Hill reports extremely positive news regarding settlement negotiations.

The Texas state attorneys defending the state’s GOP-drawn redistricting plans from court challenges have reached out to settle litigation, according to sources in the state. The settlement would give minority groups and Democrats what they’ve been demanding from the start: more heavily minority, Democratic-leaning House seats.

The result would likely mean at least four more Texas Democrats in Congress as of next year, a good start on the 25 or so seats Democrats need to win to retake control of the House.

“They’re backed up against the wall and have to come to some agreement and it’ll be awfully favorable on our end,” said one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Another plaintiff agreed. “It’s clear they know they’re in a vulnerable position and that’s why they want to settle,” he said.

Update II: In a clear indication of the ongoing confusion, this Austin American-Statesman headline -- "Federal judges warn April 3 primary in jeopardy, urge redistricting compromise" -- contradicts what they quote Judge Orlando Garcia saying in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the story: "We don't know when (the primaries) might be, but we know it won't be April 3"...

That would be way beyond the dictionary definition of 'jeopardy'.

Not-so-much 'Stros

2012-01-27T05:30:00.005-06:00

There's no astronauts any more. There's almost no Astrodome any more. Even Astroworld, which had nearly nothing to do with outer space, is a prairie again. So WTF does anyone want to be called "Astros" anyway?

“We’re looking at the name,” (brand-new Astros owner Jim) Crane said. “I said earlier that the Astros will be here, but we’re looking into that, too.”

This is a reversal of what Crane had said about the Houston name the day Major League Baseball approved his bid to purchase the team from Drayton McLane: “Astros are here to stay.”

“We haven’t said we’re going to do that, so don’t jump to any conclusions,” Crane said. “But sometimes change is good.”

Hell, I'm so old I remember when small businesses in this town were all named after the team. Astro Dry Cleaners. Astro Brake Repair. Astro Insurance. That kind of self-identification goes way beyond exploding scoreboards, groundskeepers dressed for a moon walk, and even orange-and-yellow rainbow unis.

Hey look! It's Roger Metzger! Ah shit, never mind. . . .

The day MLB completed the transfer of power from (Drayton) McLane, Crane hinted strongly that he’d be swift and decisive about how to proceed with the baseball operations. He said he’d be making a few moves right after Thanksgiving, and he followed through with the dismissal of team president Tal Smith and general manager Ed Wade. When it came time to find somebody to run the baseball operations, Crane landed a well-rounded executive – Luhnow – who helped build the St. Louis Cardinals into a World Series champion. Luhnow is trying to marry advanced data analysis with old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground intelligence to make the Astros relevant again.

Crane caused a bit of a stir with his admission on Monday that the Astros name might be subject to review. But is it a bad thing that he wants to at least explore all plausible options? With a move to the American League having been foisted upon Houston starting in 2013, with the team coming off its worst season in history, there is no time like the present to consider just about anything.

A uniform change would seem to be a given, what all the merchandising opportunities that would come with it. Teams change uniforms all the time, and the brick red and pinstripes have not conjured a lot of good feelings lately. A name change would be a considerably more radical undertaking – one the franchise has already experienced once.

Yay! You get to buy the new gear, and all those $150 jerseys you bought with names like Berkman and Oswalt and Pence can go on E-bay and be sold to the ~~hoarders~~ collectors as 'retro'. If you're one of the poor saps with 'Clemens' or 'Pettitte' on the back, sorry; you're still SOL. Believe me, most of 'em will be worth more if they change the name of the team and not just the colors and the stripes and the logos. Win-win!

See, it takes a real smart guy, a guy who didn't grow up here -- who grew up a Cardinals fan, for Pete's sake -- to come to Houston, make a shitpile of money, buy a baseball team and change everything about it. Jim Crane understands that people don't move to H-Town to retire. You people reading this are not Jim Crane's target market. He knows he's in competition with the Dynamos, and the Dynamos are way ahead of him.

Jim Crane, smarter than you because he's richer than you, understands that kids don't grow up playing baseball any longer. Keep in mind that the baseball academies are in Venezuela, not Iowa (or New Hampshire). Jim Crane knows just enough about Houston to know that we bulldoze our history around here, not preserve it.

It should be obvious to everyone by now that Jim Crane doesn't give a flip about anything relevant to his new baseball team but the money he's going to eventually be making. That's why he cut prices on the seats and the beer this year... and why he's going to cut the payroll even more than Drayton already had.

The last and only thing left for the quaint Astros fans among us to decide is how much of our money we are going to give him. This year, next year when they change leagues, and most importantly the years after that when the NL and the Astros and any lingering resentment become a distant memory. Ten years from now it will be like a faded black-and-white of your grandparents; an anachronism, like watching the game through a knothole in the fence, an afternoon World Series, and starters that go nine innings every fourth day. Jim Crane's in it for the long haul, and I don't mean another World Series appearance. At least until his lawyers can find an 'out' in his Minute Maid Park lease.

How much of our money will we give to Jim Crane because of how much we love the idea of baseball. Not baseball the way they'll be playing it in MMP for the next few years, not the Astros... not even "our" team, the Houston What's-Their-Names, for that matter. How much are we willing to pay to cling to our warm childhood recollections.

What's the going rate on nostalgia these days? Jim Crane's about to set the local market.

(apologies to Kuff for appropriating enough of his blog post title to motivate a claim of plagiarism)

Houston progressive events on tap this week

2012-01-23T19:25:00.000-06:00

At the top of my list this weekend:

Healthcare-NOW!
National Single Payer Strategy Conference in Houston

WHAT: Over 120 Representatives from 25 states and 52 organizations will meet in Houston this weekend to plan strategies to advance a single payer national health insurance plan in the USA. The best health care system plan for accessible, cost-effective, equitable and high quality health care is expanded and improved “Medicare for All”. Workshops and topics include:

*economic impact of the PPACA legislation, funding and affordability, the individual mandate, challenging electoral candidates to press forward for single payer during the election year

* defending attacks on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security

* health care inequities; exposing pharmaceutical and insurance industry corruption of government

* state plans for universal health care coverage

* building coalitions with faith-communities, professionals, peace, justice, consumer rights and labor groups

* shareholder “divestment” campaign from profit-making insurance companies

* connecting to the OccupyWallStreet movement and occupying the health care debate

* lessons from the southern states and the civil rights movement to achieve health care as a civil right

WHEN: Saturday, January 28, 2012 2pm-9pm and Sunday, January 29, 9:00am-5:00pm

WHERE: Hilton Hobby Hotel, 8181 Airport Blvd, Houston

Agenda here (.pdf). Conference info: http://www.healthcare-now.org/campaigns/strat-conf/ Co-sponsor host: Health Care for All Texas www.healthcareforalltexas.org

WHO: Senior leaders from national and regional coalitions, academic, medical care, health policy analysts, movie producers, videographers, writers and activists. Speakers available for interview include:

Dr. Claudia Fegan, Chief Medical Officer, Ambulatory & Community Health Network, Cook County
Dr. Walter Tsou, past president, American Public Health Association; Physicians for a National Health Program
Michael Lighty, Director of Public Policy, National Nurses United
Mark Dudzic, Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health
Dr. Margaret Flowers, Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care
Dr. Jerry Frankel, Physicians for a National Health Program (Texas) www.pnhp.org
Donna Smith, ("Sicko") American Patients United; California Nurses Association
Tim Carpenter, Nat’l Director, Progressive Democrats of America
Catherine Tactaquin, Executive Director, Nat’l Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights
Dr. Margaret Nosek, Executive Director, Center for Research on Women with Disabilities
John Lozier, Nat’l Health Care for the Homeless Council
Katie Robbins, Healthcare for the 99% -OccupyWallStreet-NY
Laurie Simons & Terry Sterrenberg, producers, The Healthcare Movie http://healthcaremovie.net/

Contact: Colleen O’Brien, media representative, Health Care for All TX -Houston, www.hcfat.org

281-660-9765, cobrien1ster@yahoo.com, or Cathy Courtney, HealthcareNOW Conference Planning Committee -Houston 832-677-6766, houstonc3courtney@gmail.com

Earlier in the day on Saturday:

Saturday, January 28, 2012
Knowledge is Power.

When envisioning the future of women in Texas, one thing is certain — we have only just begun to tap into the dynamic resources that will help us transform into Women of Action.

Be a part of the change.

If you are impacted by changes in health care, education or economic opportunity, you should attend this informative and action-oriented summit. Get up-to-date information about changes in the laws and direction in health care, education and economic opportunity: what to expect; how to arm yourself with the most current resources for today and the future; and most importantly, how you can make a difference.

This free summit will offer:

· Meaningful workshops on Health, Education and Economic Well-Being
· Speakers with insight as to what is really happening to women’s resources and what can be done to improve our circumstances
· A Women in Action Panel where you can speak with experts on a variety of topics
· A Women's Resource Table Fair with a variety of businesses and organizations providing resource materials
· Networking opportunities with other women

You can speak up, be heard, and become a Woman in Action.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

The Winter Women's Summit will include sessions on:

Health Care Access to resources for women's health, children, and those affected by domestic violence and sexual assault.
Education Success for Your Child in K-8 Education, The 12 Tests High School Students Must Pass, How to Fund Your Child's or Your College Education.
Economic Well-Being Information about small business opportunities, alternative work solutions, and preparing for financial security.

Tomorrow evening:

HCDP Evening Brown Bag with Jessica Farrar and SOTU Watch Party

Representative Jessica Farrar had an opportunity to observe as the Supreme Court of the United States heard the oral arguments regarding redistricting in Texas.Join us on Tuesday, January 24th at 6:30pm at HCDP HQ as she will explain her experience, and the developments since.

Farrar is currently in her 9th term as state representative of District 148. She was first elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1994 at the age of 27, and she is the longest serving Hispanic member from Harris County in the Texas House of Representatives. She is also chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus.

HCDP will also host a State of the Union Watch Party immediately after Farrar's talk starting at 7:45pm.

Wednesday afternoon:

Religion in the 2012 Elections

The Religion in the 2012 Elections symposium, sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network, takes place this Wednesday, January 25 at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy on the Rice University campus in Houston.

Event Details
When: Wednesday January 25, 1 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Where: James A. Baker III Hall, Rice University
Address: 6100 Main St. (Google Map)

Here is the agenda for the symposium.

(this event is free, but registration is full)

And Wednesday night:

An Evening with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist Leonard Pitts
Wednesday, January 25 at 7 p.m., Congregation Emanu El, Houston

One of the most emotionally engaging columnists writing today, Leonard Pitts is beloved by readers for the thoughtful way he treats complicated issues involving religion, race, culture and politics. His nationally syndicated column appears regularly in newspapers around the country, and in 2004 Pitts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Also a bestselling author, his critically acclaimed first novel, Before I Forget, was released in 2009 and a collection of his columns, Forward From This Moment, was published that same year.

Purchase tickets for "An Evening with Leonard Pitts" here.

Judges deciding TX redistricting feel deadline pressure, pass it down

2012-01-23T17:23:00.002-06:00

This just has the air of turning out badly for everybody.

Federal redistricting judges in San Antonio want to see if they can get agreement from the parties on political maps in time for an April 3 primary and said they are "giving serious consideration" to split primaries if no agreement can be reached by the first week of February.

The three federal judges said in an order issued this afternoon that they will meet with the parties on Friday instead of waiting until Feb. 1.

The five-page order is full of dates and deadlines:
The judges say they will almost certainly move a candidate filing deadline (my emphasis) now set for Feb. 1.
They said the parties should confer and submit agreed-upon interim maps for legislative and congressional elections by Feb. 6 if they "wish to maintain the current election schedule." If they can't agree, the judges want a list of districts in the Legislature's maps that each party no longer objects to.
The parties are involved in hearings in Washington, D.C., where a separate panel of three federal judges is deciding whether the Legislature's maps violate preclearance provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act. Ideally, the San Antonio judges would have that court's ruling in hand before it approves redistricting maps. It's asking the lawyers to give the Washington court a nudge: "With high respect for the importance of that proceeding and the prerogatives of that court, this Court hereby requests both sides in the San Antonio proceedings to request, on behalf of this Court, that the D.C. Court attempt to rule on the Section 5 issues in time for this court to incorporate those decisions into its ultimate decision on the redistricting plans for the 2012 elections for the Texas House of Representatives, the Texas Senate, and the U.S. Congress."
The Texas judges say they are giving "serious consideration to whether a so-called 'split primary' will be required" for this year's elections, and asked the lawyers to be ready to talk about it at the end of the week. They also want lawyers for the state to be ready to say whether the state would be prepared to reimburse counties and the political parties for the "substantial additional expense of a split primary."
The judges asked for comments on the idea of a presidential primary on April 3 with most or all other elections held later. The earlier presidential primary would relieve the Republican and Democratic political parties, which hope to have the primary elections well before their state conventions in June. The Republican Party of Texas has suggested the split primary on several occasions; the Democratic Party, in filings this week, said it would prefer a unified primary if possible.

Hustled-up court decisions, rushed maps, split primaries, new voting requirements ... it all adds up to confused voters and poor turnout.

More from Michael Li. Shorter Michael Li, from Facebook:

BREAKING: Court says to keep unified April 3 primary, parties will need to agree on interim maps by 2/6. Otherwise, court giving 'series consideration' to split primary; wants to know if state will commit to reimburse added costs. Court considering presidential only primary on 4/3 or presidential + countywide/whole county on 4/3.

Election officials from your local precinct all the way to the Secretary of State will be pressured to make decisions -- or wait for decisions to be made. Candidates, potential and incumbent, won't know what the districts they intend to represent will look like -- and neither will the voters, until very late in the process. All while Republicans keep doing their dead-level best to gum up the works, disenfranchising even their own voters as they do.

This is what one-party rule looks like, from the bottom up.

Update:

When the San Antonio court set Feb 1st as the candidate filing deadline for a April 3rd election date organizations representing Texas counties told the court in a pleading that they had “serious reservations and concerns” about their ability to comply with the April 3rd election schedule. The county organizations said that compliance would be “extremely difficult and expensive” if even physically possible...” The counties said the Feb 1st — April 3rd timeline wouldn't leave them enough time to prepare an election that usually takes six to seven weeks to prepare. Today, the Republican Party suggests lopping another week off the April 3rd timeline.

County election officials must have election precincts mapped, voter registration cards printed and mailed, ballots prepared, and voting machines programmed and delivered to polling locations not by April 3rd, but a few days before March 19th, the first day of early voting for the April 3rd election date.

The Weekly Wrangle

2012-01-23T06:10:00.001-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance thanks South Carolina for all the laughs as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

The big story last week was the SCOTUS ruling on interim redistricting maps. Off the Kuff has an initial look.

It turns out that PDiddie and Paula Deen have more in common than just their initials; there's also a morality tale involved. Read "Paula Deen, diabetes, and Novo Nordisk" at Brains and Eggs.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is tired of the media ignoring grossly untrue, inflammatory, and just plain disgusting things Republicans like Rick Perry say.

Perry's run for the presidency is over! WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on it here: Good riddance for now; Perry drops out.

This was a big week of action culminating in the defeat (for the time being) of SOPA, including January 18 when many sites blacked themselves out. Darth Politico refused to go dark, and instead went dork -- with a snark/irony blog supporting SOPA (or "Why Death Stars are a good thing").

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw mourns for Texas in "Poor Texas: Forrest Homer Simpson is Coming Back". An eloquent requiem for a candidate who brought untold levels of derision to our state when he revealed how truly shallow and narcissistic he is. Give it a read!

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote this week abour how Houston school board member Manuel Rodriguez got away with using anti-gay campaign materials in his recent re-election victory. Everyday citizens, civil rights groups and the Houston GLBT political caucus all gave Mr. Rodriguez a free pass despite his hateful words.

Sunday Funnies

2012-01-22T09:30:00.000-06:00

The South Carolina subheadlines: Colbert, Cain, Santorum and Paul

2012-01-21T06:30:00.008-06:00

Jason Stanford:

Stephen Colbert might be funny, but his exploratory campaign is no joke. The point he’s been assiduously making on “The Colbert Report” is a smart bomb wrapped inside of an absurd conundrum. Simply put, there is no greater force for campaign finance these days than Colbert. By following the tortured laws and starting his own super PAC, Colbert has unleashed a prank that could embarrass the body politic into real change.

Stephen Colbert is the most talented improvisational comedian of his generation. Only one other person in my lifetime even comes close, and he never tried to stay in a single character 100% of the time. (Sasha Baron Cohen is a solid-finishing third and Pee Wee Herman comes in a fairly distant fourth, mostly because of his tragi-comic offstage altercations.)

... Colbert mocked the reductionist absurdity of the law that danced around limits to corporate influence in politics.

“It’s how much speech they can express, because money comes from speech. … Money equals speech,” said Colbert, who then challenged (ABC's George) Stephanopoulos: “Corporations are people. You won’t weigh in on whether some people are people? That seems kind of racist.”

Is any of this more absurd than Mitt Romney denying culpability for what his super PAC does because, as he claimed in Monday’s debate, he hasn’t talked to those guys in “months”? Or, for that matter, Romney’s contention that corporations are people?

Colbert's rally with fellow clown Herman Cain in Charleston yesterday was the purest poltical irony yet seen in modern times.

"If corporations are people, then I'm a people person. The Lockheed Martin Luther Burger King, if you will."

Chuck Todd sputtered that Colbert was 'making a mockery' of the political process. Dude: you obviously haven't been paying much attention to politics over the years. Google Pat Paulsen. This has been going on since before you were born. Todd did get one thing right, though...

While expressing admiration for how Colbert has exposed a lot of the idiocy involved with the marriage of politics and money, and saying he enjoys his show, Todd went after both Colbert and Jon Stewart for mocking members of the media, then backing off and saying “we’re just comedians” when the members of the media call them out on it. “Actually, no you’re not [comedians] anymore,” Todd said. “You are mocking what we’re doing, and you want a place in this, then you are also going to be held accountable for how you cover and how you do your job.”

Yeah, somebody has mentioned that before. Back to the Palmetto Bug State and the farce of actual Republican politicians.

With the race seemingly between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Republican rival Rick Santorum is bracing for a setback and looking ahead to the next contest: Florida. [...]

Romney and Gingrich were battling for the top spot in South Carolina and Santorum was looking to post an acceptable showing. During campaign stops on Friday, he cast himself as a Goldilocks candidate: just right when compared to Gingrich's "too hot" rhetoric and Romney's "too cold" personality.

Santorum also looked to disqualify the fourth candidate in the race, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. Santorum said there were three candidates who could capture the GOP nomination and cast libertarian favorite Paul as a gadfly annoyance.

That might sting a little more if it came from a guy who remembered to pay the fee for his law license. I'm thinking that Santorum's parochial school taunts aren't having as much effect as he is praying for. Still, it's probably enough to burn the bridge between Mr. Frothy Mixture's camp and Dr. No's. Not that they ever had much in common anyway.

Ron Paul finished a strong third in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and a distant second to Romney in New Hampshire. Although he has not campaigned as much in South Carolina as he did in Iowa, he is likely to at least triple his South Carolina support from 2008 (which was 4%).

The Paul campaign has spent about $1.5 million on television advertising in South Carolina, including a spiffy spot that features a number of federal agencies going up in smoke. Beyond the Palmetto State, the campaign has signaled it will make only a modest effort in Florida because of the high cost of campaigning and because the state is unlikely to field a full slate of delegates. Florida defied Republican Party rules by moving its primary to Jan. 31; as punishment, the party has threatened to strip the state of some of its delegates.

Most observers say Paul is unlikely to get above the 20 percent mark in the upcoming primaries in Florida, Missouri, Arizona and Michigan but should do well in the upcoming caucus states of Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota and Maine. Paul’s fervent believers tend to turn out for caucuses, as they did in Iowa.

The sooner Ron Paul slides back over to the Libertarians, the more fun it will be for everybody. One last snip of brilliance:

“Ron Paul’s expected third-place finish is not that much of a surprise, as Newt Gingrich has now firmly established himself as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “What we have witnessed is less Ron Paul rising to third place and more Rick Santorum dropping to fourth place from the highs he received immediately following his success in Iowa.”

"What we have witnessed". Keep in mind that Rice University's Mark Jones is one of the most massive dumbasses who wears the title 'political scientist' ever. It's not that he gets everything wrong. He actually gets something right once in awhile (acorn/blind hog); it's that he gets paid tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of dollars for dreck like that.

People like Mark Jones are the ones making a mockery of the political process in this country. Him, and this guy:

Fox News ‘A-Team’ Psychologist: Being Married Three Times Could Make Gingrich A Better President

No excerpt. Go read it for yourself; just be prepared to piss yourself laughing.

Update: FTR, this is what 'political science' looks like.

SCOTUS tells lower court: Start over on TX maps

2012-01-20T09:41:00.002-06:00

"And this time, make 'em more like the Republicans drew 'em".

The Supreme Court on Friday instructed a lower court in Texas to take a fresh look at election maps it had drawn in place of a competing set of maps from the Texas Legislature. The justices said the lower court had not paid enough deference to the Legislature’s choices and had improperly substituted its own values for those of elected officials.

“To avoid being compelled to make such otherwise standardless decisions,” the Supreme Court’s unsigned decision said, “a district court should take guidance from the state’s recently enacted plan in drafting an interim plan. That plan reflects the state’s policy judgments on where to place new districts and how to shift existing ones in response to massive population growth.”

Adding to the clusterfuck...

The justices acted just 11 days after hearing arguments in the case. Primaries in Texas had already been moved back to April. For those primaries to proceed, officials there said, an answer from the courts was needed by Feb. 1. [...]

One set of maps was drawn by the Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. Those maps seem to favor Republican candidates. The other set was drawn by a special three-judge federal court in San Antonio, and it increases the voting power of Hispanic voters and seems to help Democratic candidates.

A unanimous ruling. As in 9-0.

So it appears the three-judge panel in San Antonio will go back to the drawing board, under a severe deadline to produce additional maps ... presumably still subject to approval of The Nine. If all that can't happen by February 1 -- 8 business days from today -- then the Texas primaries will get pushed to later in the year, creating still more chaos.

Where's all that wailing from conservatives about "activist judges" now?

Occupy the Courts today

2012-01-20T08:50:00.001-06:00

Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and specifically the civil disobedience of Dr. Cornel West, Move To Amend is planning an action event today to mark the second anniversary of the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision.

Occupy the Courts will be a one-day occupation of Federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C., on Friday, January 20, 2012.

Move to Amend volunteers across the USA will lead the charge on the judiciary which created — and continues to expand — corporate personhood rights.

In Houston this evening also, a discussion featuring 2006 Democratic candidate for Texas governor Chris Bell:

On Friday evening, January 20, join us for “Corporate Personhood vs. Your Personhood: Who Has More Rights?” This panel discussion commemorates the 2nd anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, the latest in over a century of Supreme Court decisions establishing the doctrines that corporations are people and money is speech. Panelists include former Houston city councilman and former Congressman Chris Bell, activist Arthur Shaw, and NLG attorney Burke Moore.

7:30- 10 p.m., University of Houston main campus, SEC building room 102. Free parking off Cullen in the stadium lot, across from Entrance 14. Walk across the street into Entrance 14 and you’ll see the SEC building immediately to your left.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Cleaning up the Octagon after the fights

2012-01-20T06:45:00.004-06:00

No blood, no teeth, but a nasty mess never-the-less.

The race for the Republican presidential nomination took a turn toward the South Carolina surreal Thursday as Rick Perry dropped out, Newt Gingrich faced stunning allegations from an ex-wife and Mitt Romney struggled to maintain a shaky front-runner's standing.

An aggressive evening debate capped the bewildering day.

"Aggressive" is a word I use when my pit bull sees a squirrel in the back yard. Newt turned rabid on CNN's John King.

Gingrich angrily denounced the news media for putting his ex-wife front and center in the final days of the race. "Let me be clear, the story is false," he said. Santorum, Romney and Paul steered well clear of the controversy. "Let's get onto the real issues, that's all I've got to say," said Romney, although he pointed out that he and his wife, Ann, have been married for 42 years.

The audience gave Gingrich a standing ovation when he assailed the media, a reaction he can only hope is reflected in voter sentiment on Saturday.

And just like that, it was over.

Paul Begala:

Newt Gingrich won the debate in the first minute by casting himself as the victim not of a failed marriage but of a corrupt liberal media that is in bed with Barack Obama.

Lloyd Grove:

The former speaker lashed out like the tough guy he is, as he endured everything from John King’s questions about his ex-wife’s open-marriage allegation to Santorum’s attack on his leadership abilities.

Newt Gingrich was like a giant death star, threatening at any moment to suck into his field of gravity every single molecule of matter—from his rival presidential candidates on the stage beside him to the raucous South Carolina Republicans in the audience in front of him.

Michael Tomaskey:

And that was the only truly dramatic moment of the night. John King started with Marianne, and Newt drew not one standing ovation as he had with Juan Williams, but two. “I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic that …” You couldn’t even hear the rest in the hall. First standing ovation. “Every person here knows personal pain.” Nice! Blah blah blah, “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” Blah blah blah. “I am frankly astounded.” Blah. Then—right at King. “John, don’t try to blame somebody else.” Then—a brilliant opening of the hood, showing the assembled how the machine really functions. “We offered several friends to ABC,” which didn’t want to hear from them. And finally—it took him a while, but he finally hit on where to take this, which was against the media. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama and …” Couldn’t hear the rest. Second standing ovation.

Those were turnaround lines that no one else on that stage could have pulled off, which speaks well of Gingrich in a way, but really poorly of him, which is to say that only a person essentially without conscience could do all that with such brio.

Bless his heart, Rick Santorum got in a few punches, kicks, and scratches -- not to mention the best scowls of the evening, seen repeatedly thanks to CNN's split screen. But he is simply no match for Newt. Michelle Cottle:

(Last night), Rick Santorum repeatedly and loudly cried bullshit on the speaker.

“Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” Santorum said of his opponent’s shameless self-promotion. “A month ago, he was saying, ‘Oh, I’m inevitable.’ It was, ‘I’m destined to do it.’”

Of Newt’s electoral braggadocio, Santorum charged, “These are not cogent thoughts.”

Spot on, brother. And yet...

I’ll bet $10,000 that none of Santorum’s attacks tonight will make a lasting impression on anyone who doesn’t already share his concerns.

It’s not really Santorum’s fault. The senator was, even more than usual, passionate, cogent, and earnest in his criticisms. Not to mention accurate.

But there is just something about Senator Sweater Vest that doesn’t resonate, no matter how fired up he gets. It is a matter of presentation: He is too plaintive, too beseeching—even when he’s got both barrels blazing. He is begging rather than commanding us to recognize Gingrich’s many absurdities.

It's just his fine Christian upbringing, I suppose. Not even God and His Earthly minions can save Frothy Mixture now. A smaller mess, easily cleaned up by next week.

Meanwhile, on a vast luxury cruise ship off the coast of Italy...

Mitt Romney still looks the most presidential of the foursome, but his claim of electability is wearing thin. In each successive debate, he reminds me more of Robert Redford in The Candidate. He will say and do whatever it takes, including withholding his tax returns until after he secures the nomination. Newt Gingrich is right when he says if there’s something in Romney’s tax returns that could sink his candidacy, it’s better to know now than after he’s the nominee.

Romney knows that too, which must be why he sputters and looks acutely uncomfortable when pressed to say declaratively when he’ll release his returns, and for how many years.

When asked if he would release twelve years of tax returns, as his father George did when he ran for president in 1968, Mitt said "maybe," and promptly got booed by those in the hall.

(Here's where Greg will send me another comment that says, "It was only a few people who booed...")

Ron Paul was, once more, the septuagenarian in comfortable shoes who got mostly ignored.

At one point, as moderator John King was making his rounds with each of the candidates, he inexplicably skipped over Ron Paul. The choice to skip the Texas congressman was odd given that Dr. Paul is a retired obstetrician and gynecologist. Paul, of course, noted this after a hearty round of boos from the audience.

“John, once again, it’s a medical subject. I’m a doctor!” Paul beamed. “No, I do want to make a couple comments because I can remember the very early years studying obstetrics and I was told — it was before the age of abortion. I was told taking care of a woman that’s pregnant, you have two patients. I think that solves a lot of the problem about, you know, when life begins and all.”

Paul went on to explain his experience with the 1960's culture and that "the morality of the country changed" and "the law followed up."

"When morality changed, it reflects on the laws. The law’s very important. We should have these laws. Law will not correct the basic problem. That’s the morality of the people."

That's a nice straddle between pro-life and pro-choice. Plenty of dog whistles to both sides in that answer.

All four candidates failed their history exams, as usual.

Prediction: Gingrich wins on Saturday, Santorum finishes fourth and quits shortly thereafter, and it's a two-horse race to Florida on January 31st. There are five states that caucus in February, but no primaries that count until Arizona and Michigan on February 28.

I hope this means there will be fewer debates...

Update: Santorum third with 17%, Paul fourth with 13%. It's the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse for at least a couple more weeks, maybe longer. "Hello, Costco? How much is a tractor trailer of Orville Redenbacher's?"

Happy Trails

2012-01-19T08:48:00.003-06:00

Our long statewide nightmare is over. Governor MoFo is cuttin' and runnin'.

Rick Perry is expected to drop out later this morning at an 11 a.m. press conference, two sources confirmed to POLITICO. He's also expected to endorse Newt Gingrich, the sources confirmed.

But never without some last bit of drama.

The discord in Perryworld was evident even as the candidate prepared to drop out.

Top officials in Texas said they were unaware of his intentions and as late as this morning said they genuinely didn't know whether he was still running.

Gingrich has been assiduously lobbying Perry officials in recent days, POLITICO has learned. The former House speaker has repeatedly texted Perry manager Joe Allbaugh.

Should we tell him to go on and resign the governorship now? While's in a quittin' kinda mood?

Update: Harvey K with some "first-blush thoughts"...

-- Perry is damaged goods, even in Texas. Recent polling had him in low double digits and in third or fourth place among Republicans in his home state. Although he became a much better candidate at the end, he embarrassed supporters with how little he knew about the national arena and how incapable he was of verbalizing.

-- He leadership team is in tatters. What once looked like a formidable and unstoppable juggernaut now looks like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They can regroup, but rehab will be required. Finger pointing and claims of profiteering are already dominating the Capitol bar talk.

My recommendation remains: 'Go get you a nice lobbyist job with a big fat paycheck'.

Update: Via Progress Texas...

Estimates show Governor Perry owes $2,651,429.14 to Texas taxpayers for security-related travel costs incurred during his 160-day presidential run. With $2.47 million in his state account as of December 31, 2011, Governor Perry can immediately pay back 93% of those taxpayer dollars, leaving him with an outstanding taxpayer debt of $179.949.59.

"Hello, Bob and Doylene? Uh, I need one more favor..."

Update II: Before we say goodbye...

Paula Deen, diabetes, and Novo Nordisk

2012-01-19T07:11:00.001-06:00

The celebrity chef famous for bacon and egg burgers with donuts as buns, deep fried bacon-wrapped macaroni and cheese balls, and more butter on all of it is a diabetic ... and has been for three years.

After becoming the face of diabetes-inducing cuisine, Food Network personality Paula Deen confirmed on Tuesday's Today show that she has known about having Type 2 diabetes for three years and used the occasion to start pitching diabetes drugs for Novo Nordisk. "I had to figure things out in my own head," Deen told Al Roker, explaining why she only decided to come clean about her metabolic disease now.

That's right; she waited until this week to announce it publicly ... the same time she announced her sponsorship with a Dutch pharmaceutical company ... whose product is one of the leading treatments for diabetes.

What's wrong with this picture?

Ed. note: Here's my full disclosure. I have been diabetic for eight years, have been taking Victoza for the past year, have lost 50 lbs. mostly as a result of the medication, and haven't taken a dime for anything related to my diabetes from Novo Nordisk or anyone else.

Deen made in the neighborhood of $10 million from her TV show, endorsements and sponsorships (brands such as Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Smithfield Ham) in 2010; consequently New York magazine estimates she earned as much as $30 million ~~since diagnosis~~ while she 'figured things out in her own head'.

There is no word on exactly how much Novo Nordisk is paying her to say she takes Victoza, but this source indicates it's seven figures. Deen is preaching a message of moderation now, though...

"People see me cooking all these wonderful, Southern, fattening recipes... it's for entertainment. People have to be responsible."

Ohhh that's what it's been all this time. Entertainment. Some reactions were harsh.

Hours after Deen broke the news, (Travel Channel's Anthony) Bourdain posted this message on Twitter: "Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later."

Other reactions were harsher still.

Paolo Lucchesi, the food columnist for Inside Scoop SF was frustrated "that there was not one modicum of regret or culpability for her entire persona and recipe encyclopedia, which is pretty much a butter-lubed bobsled ride to Diabetesville."

Deen has her libertarian 'personal responsibility' defenders, too.

But if Deen’s become rich showing Americans how to consume as much butterfat as possible, is that Deen’s fault? Last time I checked, cooking shows were entertainment -- what social critics call “aspirational” -- not the mandatory curriculum for home ec class. Obesity was a crisis in America long before Deen uttered her first “y’all” before a video camera. How many of Deen’s critics have also spoken out against the cream-enriched legacy of Julia Child, or James Beard -- a man of epic girth who cooked with butter and fistfuls of cheese, and who served as the moon-faced pitchman for Omaha Steaks?

John Birdsall at Chow takes it a step further, too, calling Bourdain's verbal assault not just hypocrisy but class war AND gender war.

Deen, we assume, speaks to a down-market audience who need to be lectured about nutrition and willpower. Bourdain speaks to the well-heeled traveler for whom a foie gras hot dog is an occasional indulgence, not a moral failing. Right? Or is it somehow acceptable for men to engage in extreme eating, while women have an obligation to show restraint?

Is there a moral to this story? Why, yes there is.

"Everything in moderation. Including moderation."

Obama denies KXL's permit; work on pipeline continues

2012-01-18T19:13:00.000-06:00

And TransCanada will resubmit their proposal with a new route through Nebraska. Politico:

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said in a statement. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil."

Hours before the announcement, environmental groups that consider Keystone a potential ecological disaster were signaling their glee with the expected decision. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates accused the administration of placating its green allies ahead of creating U.S. jobs.

I had given up any hope of stopping this calamity until about a month ago, when the House TeaBaggers screwed the pooch by including a provision to force a decision in 60 days as part of their capitulation on the payroll tax cut. Honestly, when I think about how blessed Obama has been with the ineptitude of his opposition, I just have to laugh.

And the pipeline may still come to be, Obama in the White House or no. But today's news has to be cheered for those who fought against the powerful, entrenched interests of the oil companies, and won.

The battle to kill this piece of shit for good goes on, however.

Thank you, Lamar Smith.

2012-01-18T06:10:00.001-06:00

For assisting Google in getting 4.5 million signatures on their anti-SOPA petition, which in turn chased fellow Congress critters -- even John Cornyn -- away from the legislation in droves; and for instigating a populist uprising against your corporate-owned ass.

Some reactions:

-- From "SOPA Will Take Us Back to the Dark Ages":

I had an epiphany today. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, was not written by people who fundamentally misunderstand how the web works. They understand all too well, and want to change it forever.

Behind the almost unreadable (yet truly scary) text of SOPA (and its Senate doppelganger, PIPA, or the Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a desire, likely fueled by powerful media conglomerate backers, to take us all back to the thin-pipe, content-distribution days of 1994

-- And from the douchebag himself...

“It is ironic that a Web site dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act,” said SOPA sponsor and chairman of the House Judiciary committee Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) “The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites. This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy,” he quipped.

-- Who supports this legislation?

The biggest backers of the antipiracy bills are the industries hardest hit by online piracy: the makers of music and movies. The Internet, and the explosion of illegal copying and sharing of music and movie files that came with it, has been economically devastating for Hollywood and recording studios, and they’ve been pushing lawmakers for years to hold Internet platforms more accountable for the illegal content that flows through their servers. The bills are also backed by makers of pharmaceuticals and luxury goods that want to strangle the market for knockoff goods. All told, hundreds of businesses led by (the US Chamber of Commerce) are pushing hard for the bills.

My general rule if that if Rupert Murdoch is in favor of it, it's probably bad for everybody else in the world.

-- The Guardian live-blogged the day.

-- Here's a list of some of the major sites who participated in the blackout.

This site spent the past 12 hours dark in solidarity. Regular posting resumes in a moment.

Debate audience boos Romney's Mexican heritage

2012-01-17T06:25:00.003-06:00

I realize it's the usual hypocrisy -- and that it's also South Carolina, where boorishness is home-schooled -- but if SC Republicans actually don't hate legal immigration, why the booing?

During a Fox News debate at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center on Monday, the Republican audience booed loudly after being told that Romney’s father was born in Mexico.

In a report last week, NBC revealed that Romney’s great grandfather, Miles Park Romney, had fled to Mexico with other Mormons to escape persecution for polygamy. Romney’s father, George, was later born in the northern Mexico colony of Colonia Dublan.

At the age of five, George Romney returned to the United States illegally after the Mexican Revolution broke out.

Were they booing Romney being an anchor baby? I doubt they were sophisticated enough to figure that out quickly enough to launch a catcall.

The audience also booed when Gingrich was asked about his "food stamps" remarks recently to a black audience, and then cheered his retort wildly. So obviously nobody reminded them that it was MLK Day. Or something.

South Carolina is breaking strongly for Mitt so this behavior is even more puzzling.

How do these Republicans behave -- what do they say -- when they're at their homes, with each other at their meetings which aren't televised? Worse than this?

I think these debates where they boo gay soldiers, boo the mention of Mexico, cheer for the death penalty and the repeal of child labor laws are something akin to picking one's nose while in traffic: I'm all alone here in the car, no one can see me, I can quickgetthis booger.

I hate to tell you this buddy, but people are watching, and they're disgusted.

MLK Day linkage

2012-01-16T08:00:00.003-06:00

Here is a good listing of quotations by Martin Luther King Jr.

Here are five stories about relatively obscure people who stood near King as he gave the speech now called "I Have a Dream", in Washington DC on August 28, 1963, at the culmination of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Here's a link to the details of the ceremony honoring Dr. King this morning at the recently-opened MLK memorial in the nation's capital. The monument itself has a truncated quotation inscribed on it which misinterprets King's words, and will be replaced with another.

This error may -- or may not -- have a thing to do with the fact that the giant stone was partly carved using imported Chinese slave laborers. I doubt King would have approved.

There are several events in Houston marking King's life today, including two parades this morning. Competing factions of supporters can't agree to march together, it seems.

As Dr. King noted...

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

MLK Day Wrangle

2012-01-16T07:05:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance honors the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff takes a look at Democratic primary races as they now stand in Harris County and elsewhere in Texas.

Refinish69 at Doing My Part for the Left thinks sometimes you just have to say "What the Hell?"

Bay Area Houston says it is time for a Joe Driver law.

CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme wants you to know that Vermin Supreme almost beat Rick Perry in Vermont.

The Texas Tea Party had a rally and a straw poll in Houston, a few rich white bigots showed up, and Rick Perry got his ass whipped again. In other words, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs observes, nothing has really changed for the TeaBaggers.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw gets us up to date on who is calling who a vulture capitialist, (or Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. See her piece: Vulture Capitalist Supporters Perry, Gingrich Demonize Vulture Capitalism.

It's been a little quiet on the issue of transportation funding lately, but that's changed. WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the latest polling nonsense about how to pay for new roads, in Here we go again.

Neil at Texas Liberal offered the 5th annual posting of his Martin Luther King reading & reference list. There are 3 new additions for 2012. This list is the best starting point to learn about M.L.K. to be found on the web.

Sunday Funnies

2012-01-15T08:30:00.000-06:00

Ron Paul, Ted Cruz win Texas TP straw poll

2012-01-14T18:55:00.003-06:00

Ron Paul won a very listless Texas Tea Party straw poll, with 27.9% of 707 in-person votes cast, conducted today at Houston's Minute Maid Park.

Newt Gingrich was second with 23.8%. Rick Santorum, the choice of the College of Protestant Cardinals meeting today ~~in the Sistine Chapel~~ at a cattle ranch in Brenham, was third at 21.2%. Rick Perry finished just out of the money in 4th place with 19.4%. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney was well back of the pack at 6.6% and Jon Huntsman finished next-to-last at 1.1%, ahead of my selection, Buddy Roemer, who had 0.0.

Paul was even more popular with the 3,332 text voters at 54.4%. The rest of the field changed positions somewhat...

Rick Santorum 15.6%
Rick Perry 13.3%
Newt Gingrich 11.9%
Mitt Romney 4.2%
Jon Huntsman 0.5%
“Buddy” Roemer 0.0%

In the US Senate $75-a-head poll, Ted Cruz walloped David Dewhurst 47.8% to 10.3%. Glenn Addison, the crowd favorite from Thursday night's debate, came in second with 19.9% and Craig James fourth with 9.9%. Cruz also did a little better with the texters, getting 49.1% while Dewhurst slipped to fourth with 7.1% behind James and Addison, who received 12.9 and 12.0 respectively.

Lots of good seats remained available throughout the day.

Attendees and phone voters also got to pick their favorite Congress critters and statehouse senators and representatives. Those results are even less interesting than the ones above and can be found here and here (scroll down).

A riveting lineup of speakers kept the hundred or so Aricept-addled TPers transfixed throughout the day. Breitbart warmed 'em up with a little of his usual crap. "Rock Me Like A" Herman Cain brought some books to sell. Dick Armey pimped his PAC. Update: Both men pimped Mitt Romney, to little avail.

The rest of the talkers were there shilling for 2012 votes; even dipwad Jerry Patterson, not listed on the program, was spotted via stream speaking from the dais at one point.

The conservative local media tried as hard as they could to give the event relevance; alas, they failed. Michael Berry and Matt Patrick of KTRH, Sam Malone and Chris Baker of KSEV, Joe Pags of KPRC, Jon-David Wells of KSKY in Dallas, and Natalie Arceneaux of KNTH made a day of it, to the everlasting chagrin of their program directors. Thank goodness they'll all get a comp day for working on the weekend, giving the market a break from their hate.

All in all, a waste of a beautiful day by our local Tea Party contingent. Just what we've come to expect.

Texas Tea Time this weekend (and more minority reports)

2012-01-13T06:00:00.005-06:00

The last time our loudest, whitest, most bigoted friends had a get-together it was at the LaMarque dog track to sing the praises of the Pizza Man. This Saturday they're drawing straws to let Rick Perry win something. Or maybe Ron Paul. Big Daddy Cain will be there again.

Former Texas Congressman Dick Armey, former presidential candidate Herman Cain and the Republican candidates hoping to succeed U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison are among the prominent names scheduled to speak to a weekend gathering of tea partiers at Minute Maid Park.

Sponsored by a coalition of Houston-area tea party groups, the Saddle Up Straw Poll gives attendees the opportunity to express their preferences in the presidential race, congressional races and Texas legislative races. About 1,000 people are expected to attend the two-day event. Voters must have a valid Texas ID.

"The goal is not to steer people towards one candidate or another, or promote only the Texas candidates Perry and Paul, or to promote a 'tea party' candidate, but to host a poll that more likely reflects the actual Republican primary voters," said event spokeswoman Felicia Cravens in a statement on the website Full Metal Patriot.

At least they're no longer pretending to be anything but Republicans. That's a good first step toward self-awareness. Most relevant items needed for this meetup:

Voters must have a valid Texas ID.

...and...

Tickets at the door are $75.

Speaking of Texas Republican Senate candidates:

Major Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate knocked heads Thursday night in a debate that was more lively than the presidential forums that have become a TV mainstay.

Several candidates threw verbal punches at Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the frontrunner. The guy in the back in the polls, Magnolia funeral home director Glenn Addison, turned out to be the evening's crowd pleaser, though.

None of the candidates had any immediately apparent campaign-altering gaffes. Most of the jabs were between Dewhurst, Ted Cruz and Tom Leppert, who've been in the race the longest and who were raising significant amounts of money in the last reports. Craig James, the fifth man on stage, got into the race in December — he actually made his formal announcement earlier on the day of the debate — and hasn't yet reported his campaign finances.

Sponsored by Mucous -- because it's cold and flu season, after all -- the race to replace "Texas' most popular politician" is as freaky as you would expect.

James: "I believe in the 2nd Amendment. I've got a pistol and a shotgun between my mattresses."

A person would certainly need two mattresses if he chose to sleep on a shotgun. More like this...

• Dewhurst opens: Obama trampling on our God-given rights. "I want to go to Washington and cut spending."

• Cruz says he will throw his body in front of a train to stop Obamacare.

• Leppert: A flat tax is an opportunity to expand the base... the tax code has more words than the Holy Bible.

• Addison says he wants to kill the EPA; calls it a "job-killer." Now taking on China and "spineless, wussy senators" who won't react.

More live-blogging of last night's debate here. Just can't wait for the next one. How about some more stupid and crazy?

Preaching a conservative message is a better way to connect with the growing U.S. Hispanic community than to mention the Republican Party by name, the nation's first Hispanic tea party group president said at an Austin forum on Thursday.

"Whenever the word 'Republican' is used, it was almost like an automatic wall that falls," George Rodriguez, president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said at a conference organized by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Yet when we used the word 'conservative,' people were more responsive."

Got that, TeaBags? In order to woo Latinos, don't say 'Republican', say 'conservative'. That's your victory strategy. And don't wear your furry elephant head with the long trunk, wear your white hooded sheet. They'll never recognize you. It's like camoflage.

I wonder if the Tea Party has any plans for Monday?

Update: There is also a separate straw poll being conducted via text from your cellphone.

In order to help Texans have a voice in the presidential primary process, Saddle Up Texas organizers have created a free text poll to accompany the in-person straw poll at the Saddle Up Texas Straw Poll event this weekend. ...

The poll will also include the same races featured on the ballot for voters at the Saddle Up Texas event. Text options include the U.S. Senate race, U.S. House races, Texas Senate races and Texas House races. Voters will not be charged for voting in the text poll, and will only be allowed to vote using phones with Texas area codes, and may vote only once in each race.

The Saddle Up Texas Straw Poll text option will be available from noon Thursday, January 12th to 2 p.m. Saturday, January 14th. Instructions for voting in the straw poll are available at http://www.saddleuptexaspoll.com/text

I have just cast my ballot. =)

Republicans activate self-destruction sequence

2012-01-12T06:20:00.001-06:00

Three-minute version:

28-minute version:

When you have both Newt Gingrich (with a generous assist from his casino billionaire BFF Sheldon Adelson) AND Rick Perry calling Mitt Romney a vulture capitalist, the Republican nominee in 2012 -- be it Romney or "Not" -- is already in quicksand up to his waist.

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have both gone on the attack against Governor Oops for using OWS language against the front-runner. Gingrich, in his elegantly duplicitous style, blames Obama for his attacks on Romney. This is the big tent of the GOP collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy. An amazing sight, really.

I have mostly been of the mind that that Republicans would start falling in line like they always do, the Not-Romneys re-indoctrinating themselves into a hive mind of Not-Obamas. That, of course, could still happen. Romney's squeaker in Iowa, landslide in New Hampshire, and formidable lead in South Carolina strongly suggest he will be the nominee. But the probability percentage started moving down a week ago as the conservative infighting went public, and as these developments designed to influence Palmetto State voters continue to evolve, the long-term damage is deep and probably mortal. Whomever emerges from this dirigible explosion is simply going to be too wounded to win in November. And the worse it gets for that person, the more likely it is that Obama will coast to re-election -- with the usual conditions of no unforeseen crises (like a war with Iran, for example) or self-inflicted wounds -- and I am more convinced than ever that Ron Paul is going to have a larger say in the matter. Even Jim DeMint thinks so. Paul draws voters from every point on the political spectrum, particularly younger voters and the military. His acolytes see him as the agent of radical change they believe the country is in need of. I still cannot see Dr. No as the GOP nominee but he is Ross Perot-level viable as a third party candidate already.

Frankly though, to me it looks like it's time for party activists with a US Senate election in their state -- or a close contest in the US House -- to start concentrating on those races.

SCOTUS hears arguments about TX redistricting, leaves us guessing

2012-01-09T16:15:00.005-06:00

Allow me to cut to the chase: the Texas primary election date (now April 3, previously March 6) is likely going to be shifted to later in the year again.

Well aware that it must act swiftly, the Supreme Court on Monday pondered two simple ways and one considerably more complex way to let Texas go forward with its 2012 elections for state legislature and Congress, but left open the possibility that Texas’ present election calendar might have to be stretched out. In a 68-minute argument on three redistricting cases from the Lone Star State, the Justices eagerly explored specific solutions to an unusually tangled controversy, and got into the counting of days open for them to act.

The simplest plan was to let Texas do what it wants -- use the redistricting maps its state legislature drew earlier this year, unchanged. But only Justice Antonin Scalia seemed eager to embrace that approach. The next most simple plan, and one that seemed likely to get at least grudging support from the two legal combatants, was to let Texas use any part of its maps that have not been specifically challenged in court, and then require it to bear the burden of proving that the other parts were valid, too, before it can use those parts. It was an idea floated late in the argument by the junior Justice, Elena Kagan.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's idea, ominously predicted here, is to ignore Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Potentially more complex was an idea put forth by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, to take completely out of this case any consideration of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and confine it to direct questions of what parts of the Texas plan violate Section 2 of that Act, violate the Constitution, or violate one-person/one-vote guarantees. So far, that plan would put the next step up to a federal District Court in San Antonio, whose “interim” maps are under challenge...

What Kennedy appeared to be suggesting was that the San Antonio court — the only lower court whose action so far is now before the Justices — should confine itself to Section 2 and leave the Section 5 dispute to the Washington court. He did concede at one point, however, that there were potential complications with that, because the Washington court also had before it, in addition to Section 5 challenges, some challenges under Section 2 and the Constitution. As Kennedy mused over the thought, he said, almost inaudibly, “That doesn’t work.”

Moving down a little further in the article, there is this:

After several of the Court’s more liberal Justices had said, in questioning Clement, that Section 5 barred Texas from using its legislature’s plans until they had gained clearance in the Washington court, Justice Scalia commented to the federal government’s lawyer that ‘that is not an absolute rule.” Allowing Texas to use its own maps, the Justice said, would be a “reasonable exception to a non-absolute rule” about the priority of Section 5′s clearance requirements. There was no indication that any other Justice picked up on that notion.

While the federal lawyer, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan, was making his argument, Justice Kennedy said “the problem with this case” was that the San Antonio court was dealing with “a Section 2 suit,” and yet “Section 5 is driving it.” Section 5, Kennedy went on, puts some states “at a tremendous disadvantage” as they try to defend themselves against a Section 2 lawsuit while they are simultaneously trying to get clearance for their election changes under Section 5. “Why,” Kennedy wondered, “should Section 5 take precedent in a Section 2 suit.”

Kennedy did not seem content with Srinivasan’s suggestion that, when a state was covered by Section 2, “it can’t help but drive” what a court like the San Antonio court can do even though that court had no authority to rule on the Section 5 aspect of a state election plan.

Section 5 of the VRA, also known as pre-clearance by the DOJ of proposed maps by certain states due to their history of voting rights abuses, is eventually going to get struck down by this Court. Perhaps not in this case, perhaps it will only be frayed a bit around the edges, but its day with the executioner is coming. The signs seem clear enough to me, but most on-hand observers -- particularly the ones who are lawyers, unlike me -- seem more upbeat; the only thing coming out of today's hearing that they agree on is that the state's primary elections are probably moving to later in 2012, perhaps May at this point.

That's OK with me; they used to be in May for years before Texas tried to get in the Super Tuesday sweepstakes.

One more thing...

Because the Court has been told that new maps must be in place by February 1, if the presently scheduled April 3 primary is to go forward, the Justices are expected to act quickly, though on no specifically known timetable. It is conceivable that they could issue a fairly brief order, with an explanation to come in a later opinion. Both of the two District Courts involved in the Texas cases have taken that very approach. However, if the outcome the Supreme Court chooses is to include new guidance for the San Antonio court, that presumably could not await the preparation of a later opinion.

And one last thing specific to Section 5 from Harvey Kronberg:

In one of the weekend talking head shows, Attorney General Greg Abbott lead with a core argument in challenging the Voting Rights Act. He said there was a fundamental shift because Texas Republicans were electing Hispanics.

His comments were part of his explanation about the arguments before the United States Supreme Court this afternoon which some see as a possible vehicle for overturning key elements of the VRA.

But General Abbott’s argument was misleading. The Voting Rights Act is less about election outcomes than it is election inputs.

The Voting Rights Act is about enabling African Americans and Latinos to impact the outcome of elections as communities of interest -- not guaranteeing a proportional quota of brown and black faces in a legislative body.

The VRA is intended to prevent the bank shot disenfranchisement of minorities that results by splintering their communities into politically neutered entities.

Harvey is, as always, correct.

Update: Republican lawyer and blogger Robert Miller has his take.

Update II: And some additional insight from HK.

Several justices queried counsel on both sides of the case on whether pushing back the primary date further into the spring or early summer would pose a problem. At one point, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Jose Garza, who presented oral arguments for the plaintiffs challenging the Texas maps, a detailed set of questions on how late could a decision be handed down to have a late June primary (my emphasis). The last Presidential primary this year is June 26. After doing some back of the envelope math, they seemed to agree that late March would be the latest possible date for establishing interim maps.

Late March? The primary is currently scheduled for April 3. This part makes no sense to me. And a ray of light:

Many court observers in recent days have speculated on whether Supreme Court justices hostile to the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act would seize on this case to make a further statement on the section’s viability. But Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to take such speculation off the table when he pointedly interrupted Garza to state that the VRA’s constitutionality wasn’t at issue today.

The Weekly Wrangle

2012-01-09T06:30:00.001-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks that watching football this past weekend -- in particular the Houston Texans' victory over the Cincinnati Bengals -- was a much better use of your time than watching the 388th and 389th Repubican presidential debates. Here's this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff discusses the state's appeal of the injunction granted against the horrible sonogram law.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the fact that our politics can't be fixed until the money is taken out of our political process: It's the money.

The case against the Texas Republicans' redistricting argument (beginning before the SCOTUS on January 9) rests almost entirely on two generations of legal precedent. And with a Court that has indicated an interest in eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, precedent doesn't mean diddly, either. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs elaborates.

BossKitty at TruthHugger has had enough of the religious bullying by the 2012 Republican presidential candidates, specifically Rick Santorum. Why do we need a Jesus candidate?

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw explains why Romney's "job creator" lies are, well ... lies. Check it out: Mitt Romney: A Job Killer, Not Creator.

From Bay Area Houston: The Texas Ethics Commission, Jerry Eversole, and the GOP. Texas sized embarrassments.

BlueBloggin sees the consequences of not paying attention when corporate-funded American politicians make it easy to break environmental rules, ruin natural resources and not be held accountable to the human victims.

Neil at Texas Liberal noted a certificate he received in the mail from the Department of Veterans Affairs that noted his recently deceased father's military service. Neil's dad, a Korean War combat veteran, would have been glad that the certificate was signed by Barack Obama and not by a draft-dodging liar like George W. Bush.

Sunday Funnies

2012-01-08T08:00:00.000-06:00

This post was almost comprised completely of Rick Santorum quotes as captions for New Yorker cartoons. But after yesterday's takedown, I didn't want you to think that I was being overly harsh on the man.

Rick Santorum on pre-existing conditions

2012-01-07T07:10:00.005-06:00

Falling ill because you did "things wrong" seems to be in complete contradiction to what Jesus actually said about pre-existing conditions.

Rick Sanctimonious is really not just the worst kind of Republican or even the worst kind of Christian; he's the worst kind of human being. Because he either willfully ignores the teachings of Jesus for the sake of political expediency, or he's a bald-faced liar and prevaricating ass masquerading as a pious man.

But more importantly this reveals in its purest form the rationale (sic) of the ultra-conservative Christian. If you are healthy God has blessed you because you are a devout Christian, if you are sick God is punishing you for something. In this delusion you may also substitute for healthy/sick the words rich/poor -- this particularly is the gospel of Joel Osteen -- and white/any other skin color, etc. Consequently ... why should I pay more in taxes because you sinned?

Understanding it is really as simple as this: My Faith is Better and Stronger Than ANY Science. This in turn explains their disbelief in evolution, climate change, the Frankenstein-like transformation of women's reproductive choice into "baby-killing", and so on and so forth. When Pat Robertson says that New Orleans was flooded by a hurricane because God perceived the city as full of sin, that's part of it. When Rick Perry says that the nation is in crisis and the only thing that can save it is thousands of people gathering in a football stadium to simultaneously pray, that's part of it too.

This is plain old Christian Science. Most Christians don't want to admit that.

The worst part is that this is not the kind of thinking that can be improved with education. This is chosen ignorance; a lucid rejection of facts and logic. I'm using the word 'lucid' in its most generous definition (#2, here).

I almost want to avoid exposing this charlatan in the hope that the GOP presents him as their presidential nominee -- almost as much as I do Ron Paul -- but rarely does a man this vile provide such an opportunity to crucify himself with his own words.

Just couldn't let that pass.

Texas redistricting case hinges on legal precedent

2012-01-06T05:00:00.013-06:00

The case is as cut and dried as the beef jerky at Buccee's.

The U.S. Supreme Court would have to close its eyes to precedent if it agrees with the state of Texas regarding disputed redistricting maps, a voting rights expert said Thursday.

The court will hear arguments Monday on efforts by the state of Texas to stop interim maps drawn by a federal court in San Antonio. The state wants to use maps drawn by the Republican controlled Legislature, which minority and civil rights groups contend discriminate against minorities.

The legislative-drawn maps have not been cleared by the Department of Justice or, alternatively, by a federal court in the District of Columbia. Because the state’s map has not been pre-cleared, it can’t be used for the 2012 election, said Pamela S. Karlan, co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the Stanford Law School. She also made the short list of candidates to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter when he retired.

[...]

“This case, as a sheer matter of law, is such a straightforward case under the Supreme Court’s existing precedent,” Karlan said in a conference call with reporters. “It’s pretty clear what they have to do here.”

We already know that this Court has a fondness for disregarding precedent, between Bush v. Gore and Citizens United.

The state’s map also has a serious flaw in the congressional district (No. 23) stretching from south San Antonio into far west Texas. The court struck down the drawing of that district in a 2006 ruling when (Supreme Court Justice Anthony) Kennedy said it denied Latinos an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.

An expert witness for the state conceded during a trial last fall that the 23rd Congressional district was not a minority-opportunity district, which the law required.

“This time around the state has gone back and done it again – in exactly the same district,” Karlan said, suggesting the replay could have a powerful effect on the court.

“The Supreme Court, for all the other things it doesn’t like, one of the things they really don’t like is when states disregard the Supreme Court’s own decision,” she said. “And the Supreme Court’s decision was Texas had denied Latinos on the border an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, and now we see Texas doing it again.”

Let's back up in the article and pull out the specific legal precedent the SCOTUS -- more specifically Justice Kennedy -- would have to overturn:

In a 1991 redistricting case (Clark v. Roemer) Kennedy, writing for a unanimous court*, said: “Section 5 requires States to obtain either judicial or administrative preclearance before implementing a voting change… Failure to obtain either judicial or administrative preclearance 'renders the change unenforceable.'”

Simply stated, the State of Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott, and his hired gun Paul Clement do not have a case ... unless Anthony Kennedy has changed his mind 180 degrees from Clark v. Roemer twenty years ago. *Note in that link that even Justice Antonin Scalia voted in favor. For many reasons, this one among them, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that either man would reverse himself.

And on the chance that Kennedy has changed his mind, that would represent the epitome of a flip-flopping judicial activist. And the only good thing about that outcome is that we won't have to endure Republicans' cries of agony if Kennedy decides to put on the robe emblazoned "I busted up the Voting Rights Act".

Their confidence in this outcome may have been tipped by Abbott's taking a few days off last week from preparing for the case and rolling up to Iowa to campaign for Governor Oops.

The trial begins Monday and will conclude before the end of the month, with a swift decision expected, possibly by January 31st.

Update: Via Michael Li, from Facebook...

The State of Texas keeps hinting in various courts that there are constitutionality problems with section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (the so-called preclearance provisions). However, in Gov. Perry's Virginia ballot access suit, he argues that Virginia's ballot access rules are not legal because (wait for it) they have not been pre-cleared under the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans in turmoil following Iowa

2012-01-05T08:00:00.002-06:00

Frank Luntz, one of the guys who tells the Republican party what to say, do, and think, is scared. And speaking about it publicly indicates how scared he is.

At Ron Paul's caucus night event in Ankeny, Iowa, most of his supporters were celebrating. Paul finished a strong third in Tuesday night's caucuses.

But one man in the crowd -- famed Republican strategist Frank Luntz-- was much more concerned with what happens next.

"I think over the next 24 to 48 hours, the campaign's gonna get a little bit meaner, a little darker, and a little bit more personal, as the candidates now fight for their life," said Luntz, who spoke with NPR in between television appearances Tuesday night.

For Luntz, the lack of a clear GOP front-runner will make for a protracted primary season that could drag on through April. And he says it won't be pretty: "Republicans are not gonna like what's about to happen. ... I think a war is about to break out within this primary field."

The Christian conservative elitists -- James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, Gary Bauer and many of the people who organized Rick Perry's Prayerpalooza in Houston last August -- have called an executive session with God to help them pick between Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

A group of movement conservatives has called an emergency meeting in Texas next weekend to find a “consensus” Republican presidential hopeful, POLITICO has learned.

“You and your spouse are cordially invited to a private meeting with national conservative leaders of faith at the ranch of Paul and Nancy Pressler near Brenham, Texas, with the purpose of attempting to unite and to come to a consensus on which Republican presidential candidate or candidates to support, or which not to support,” ...

Following Rick Perry's about-face in spandex yesterday, you have to think he's still under prayerful consideration from the God Squad. It's South Carolina we're talking about, after all. Perry still has $3.5 million to spend, and is just the kind of guy they like in SC. Newt is clearly bitter and wants to take a piece out of Romney. Santorum, the luckiest last man standing before Iowa, is already defensive about his earmarks and his racially-charged statements. Ron Paul is, well, Ron Paul. Nobody in the GOP really cares for the man except for his brainwashed caucus, and it turns out most of them aren't Republicans anyway. He will eventually be excommunicated, but that will take another month or two to finish.

This theory that Mitt Romney loses by winning is plausible. Yesterday the Atlantic made the case, and reading that today you can see how the scenarios have been scrambled again just by Rick Perry's forgetting to drop out (yet). I have no doubt that the folks assembling outside of Houston next weekend convinced Governor Oops to stay in the race long enough for them to figure out what God is telling them.

I need another pallet of popcorn delivered by forklift. How about you?

Spinning class in session

2012-01-04T03:40:00.004-06:00

These results can mean anything you want them to mean.

"Thank you Iowa": Those were the first three words of Mitt Romney's planned speech on Tuesday night after the caucuses, according to a photographer who saw the text queued up in the candidate's teleprompter. Minutes before Romney took the stage, his staff took the teleprompter away.

He wanted to claim victory, but couldn't because the outcome was still in doubt (at 11:30 p.m. CT). Mitt eventually did win, however -- by 8 votes out of just over 119,000 cast. Iowa, it turns out, has about three-fourths the electorate of the city of Houston's mayoral contest two months ago.

Considerably less diversity, of course. To say nothing of giving Mayor Parker bragging rights in her own landslide. But back to Cornpocalypse; the media dutifully reported the caucus results with all of the horse race aspects intact ... and as if the results actually meant something of significance.

But Tuesday's close call undermined (Romney's) rise. Even as he earned back much of the vote he won four years ago, Romney failed to grow his base of support, or to elicit much passion from a Republican electorate that has spent much of the last year searching for an alternative candidate.

Perhaps most nerve-wracking for the Romney campaign is that his close finish came even as his GOP rivals largely ignored him in the state, instead training their fire on one another. That free pass won't exist starting Wednesday, as Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all announced plans to aggressively go after Romney's candidacy.

Ah, there he is: Mr. Frothy Mixture, surging from behind.

"Game on," Santorum said as he took the stage at his victory night celebration in Johnston, Iowa.

"What wins in America are bold ideas, sharp contrasts, and a plan that includes everyone," he said. "A plan that includes everyone across the economic spectrum."

Yes, and it nearly won in Iowa also. Too bad the eight Hawkeyes who had the Santorum Salad at the Pizza Ranch in Boone had a bad taste in their mouths and switched their votes to Romney at the last minute. We'll never know for sure.

Ron Paul's close third continues the dilemma for the Greedy Old Pharts.

"This momentum is going to continue. This movement is going to continue, and we're going to continue scoring, just as we did tonight," Paul told cheering supporters at a hotel in a northern suburb of Des Moines. "We will go on. We will raise the money. And I have no doubt about the volunteers. They will be here."

The libertarian-leaning Paul challenged Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for the top slot in the leadoff nominating contest, cobbling together an enthusiastic and diverse coalition of college students, veterans and tea party activists in a sign of the divided GOP's struggles ahead.

"There were essentially three winners," Paul told the crowd as it chanted "Doctor Paul, Doctor Paul."

At some point Fox is going to have to start mentioning his name. Maybe have him on a show or two. Ask him some questions. You know, acknowledge his existence.

Meanwhile, Newt plots his comeback. And revenge.

Bruised, battered and defiant, Newt Gingrich limped out of Iowa after a fourth-place finish in the state's Republican presidential contest on Tuesday. But he is still alive.

Hit by plummeting poll numbers in recent days, Gingrich is likely now to hold on until the South Carolina primary on January 21 and hope for the backing of conservatives there.

[...]

Gingrich lashed out at Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, who has been linked to some of the toughest attack ads that toppled the former House of Representatives speaker from the top place in the Iowa polls. (He also) blamed SuperPAC fundraising groups linked to Romney and libertarian Ron Paul for the negative TV ads.

"Together I think we survived the biggest onslaught in the history of the Iowa primary," Gingrich said.

"We aren't going to go out and run nasty ads," Gingrich told supporters after it became clear he had won just 13 percent of the Iowa vote.

"But I do reserve the right to tell the truth. And if the truth seems negative, that may be more a comment on (Romney's) record than it is on politics," he said.

"We will have one other great debate and that is whether this party wants a Reagan conservative who helped change Washington in the 1980s ..." Gingrich said.

"Somebody who is into changing Washington or we want a Massachusetts moderate who in fact would be pretty good at managing the decay but has given no evidence in his years in Massachusetts of any ability to change the culture, or change the political structure, or change the government."

One thing is clear; that's more manly talk than than Rick Perry is mumbling.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday that he would head home "to determine whether there is a path forward" for his White House bid after he finished a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses.

At times pausing to collect his emotions, Perry told supporters that he appreciated their work but that he needed to consider whether there was a viable strategy for him to restart his campaign in South Carolina.

"With the voters' decision tonight in Iowa, I decided to return to Texas, assess the results of tonight's caucus, determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race," Perry said, his family standing behind him.

Oh come on, Governor Oops. Have Anita whip you up some fresh brains and you'll be alive and stumbling like a zombie again in no time. I hear South Carolina and Florida actually have weather as nice as Galveston this time of year.

Why even Michele Bachmann has bigger balls than you.

"I believe that I am that true conservative who can and who will defeat Barack Obama in 2012," she said. "What we need is a fearless conservative, one with no compromises on their record on spending on health care, on crony capitalism, on defending America, on standing with our ally Israel."

Shortly before Bachmann spoke, her campaign manager suggested she might leave the race. Asked if he could say with certainty whether she would go forward with her candidacy, Bachmann campaign manager Keith Nahigian told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, "I don't know yet."

You may not know yet, Keith, but The Iron Lady does.

"Over the next few days, just be prepared," Bachmann said. "The pundits and the press will again try to pick the nominee based on tonight's results but there are many more chapters to be written on the path to our party's nomination."

Bachmann, it seems, is surrounded by pussies, some current advisers and some former.

“I feel badly for Michele and her team because she has worked very, very hard,” (former campaign manager Ed Rollins) said. “Unfortunately she may have peaked too soon and at the end of the day she didn’t pass the muster that you need to be seen as a credible candidate. I think if she goes on she will go into debt.”

Rollins said that after the Iowa caucuses, Bachmann’s prospects will grow even dimmer.

“I think to a certain extent, there is no way — she has no organization in New Hampshire,” he said. “South Carolina is toughest politics that we play. And you’re going to have Perry and Gingrich and others fight. She would be better to endorse somebody today. She won’t take my counsel but at the end of the day, don’t go in debt.”

Fight on, Crazy Eyes! Fight on! Show Rick Perry and the rest of those liberal rat bastards what "man up" looks like!

I really don't want it to be over. It's been such a thrill ride, these madcap Republicans and their campaign follies. By this time next week we may only have three or four of 'em to kick around some more.

Update: Alas, the Warrior Queen lays down her sword ... but the Head Figure Head Tweets that it's still on for him.

Update II: Transmogrification of Rick Perry into Farouk Shami is complete.

About (10:30 a.m), after Gov. Rick Perry tweeted, "Here we come South Carolina!!!" my editor asked me to try to confirm the Texas governor's apparent reversal of his plans.

I called Perry spokesman Mark Miner. No answer. I then called Perry press person Catherine Frazier. This time, I somehow was connected, though she didn't say hello. I heard Miner telling her, "He tweeted we're going on to South Carolina. Every reporter in the world is calling."

The line then went dead, and in further calling, I could reach neither spokesperson nor Perry adviser Ray Sullivan.

First Weekly Wrangle of 2012

2012-01-02T08:30:00.001-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes everyone a happy and prosperous New Year as it brings you the first roundup of 2012.

There were two big redistricting stories last week, and both favored the plaintiffs against Texas and its retrogressive maps. The DC Court issued its decision defining preclearance standards, and the Justice Department filed an amicus brief with SCOTUS arguing it should use the interim maps drawn by the San Antonio court. Off the Kuff has the details on each.

BossKitty at TruthHugger can only laugh at what the GOP has put in the store window this election season: 2012 GOP Lineup and Songs From The 1960s.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson weighs in on redistricting and the Voting Rights Act: Texas Redistricting Round Up.

More Dallas wastewater is headed for Houston, as a project to route more of the Trinity River toward the Bayou City moves forward. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs says that he can't wait to pour a tall glass of Metroplex toilet water.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme screams to the high heavens that Ron Paul is not a principled man.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted about a longtime musician friend looking to form a new protest band in Cincinnati. It's unlikely that anybody in Texas will be able to join this band. But that's not the point. The point is that we all have talents, and we should work hard to make the best use of our talents in the big political year ahead. Don't just sit around and let somebody else generate content for you to consume.

The Lewisville Texan Journal (formerly WhosPlayin) examined TxDOT right-of-way purchases along the I-35E corridor in Denton County, finding that the state was paying much more for properties than the tax roll values. Denton County's Republican County Judge Mary Horn, who is spearheading the effort to expand the road with toll lanes received $993,000 for an investment property she had, which was 19.7 times more than what it was on the tax rolls for.

Auld Lang Syne Funnies

2012-01-01T08:00:00.000-06:00

New Orleans for (in-between) the holidays

2011-12-31T12:38:00.006-06:00

The latest in a continuing series of Diddie travelogues.

For the past few years we have chosen to give ourselves as a Christmas present an out-of-town trip. It works well for us in contrarian fashion; we like to go when traffic and hotel room demand is light and no long lines for restaurants or excursions. Last year it was San Antone, this year we picked N'awlins as our end-of-the-year holiday vacay. We drove over last Tuesday, pausing in Lake Charles for lunch at Steamboat Bill's. I have somehow managed never to have stopped here even though its reputation is large, offline and on (Southern Living magazine and USA Today have raved about it in years past). It was as reputed: tasty, huge portions, inexpensive and fast -- off and back on I-10 in 40 minutes. I had a bowl of shrimp gumbo and some chicken strips but Madam Diddie splurged ahead of NOLA's gastronomia with a seafood platter of fried catfish, stuffed shrimp and crab, and about ten decent-sized fried shrimp.

Arriving in the Big Easy early -- around 3:30, we waited for our room at the Dauphine to be ready with a cocktail in May Baily's. From the site...

May Baily's Place, once one of the better known bordellos in the wildly infamous red-light district known as Storyville, now serves as our hotel bar. Our "Bordello" guest suite takes an appropriate featured place above May Baily's, and a red light still burns in the courtyard next to it as a testimony to its sordid history. Today guests are provided with a copy of the license issued to May in 1857, when sporting houses were legal in the Storyville district of New Orleans.

Dinner Tuesday was going to be oysters no matter what, and while we considered the Acme, we chose the less-popular-but-no-less spectacular Royal House Oyster Bar, and yours truly selected the baked ones three different ways: Rockefeller (topped with spinach sautéed with bacon and sambucca stuffing), Royale (shrimp, crawfish, and crabmeat stuffing), and Pepperoni (smoked chipotle peppers, green onions and parmesan cheese stuffing). The scrumptiousness defied description. The wife couldn't be convinced to sample those, or the bubbling char-broiled ones either, and had her usual dozen raw. Gumbo for me and shrimp bisque for her rounded out the light dining. A stroll down Rue de Bourbon and the expected chicanery and debauchery completed the evening and got us both in the proper festive attitude.

Breakfast, after bypassing the hotel's continental, was had at Cafe Fleur De Lis, based strictly on glowing online reviews and proximity to the Dauphine. I have always enjoyed ambling the Qwawtah in the early hours -- as in dawn, 6-8 a.m. -- when the drunks have laid it down, the early-risers like me are poking about, the working men and women are making deliveries, cleaning up from last night inside and out, and so on. We made our way back a different way, passing by the NOPD station on Royal Street and the upscale galleries and antique shops there, up to the Hotel Monteleone on the corner at Iberville Street. Since we have done all of the ghost and cemetery tours in prior visits, and also since my damned Meneire's-induced vertigo precludes any swamp boat rides or dinner cruises, we found two good options: Oak Alley Plantation for Wednesday and a Treme' walking tour for Thursday.

The antebellum period homes have entranced me ever since I first went through the Bishop's Palace, Ashton Villa, and the Menard home in Galveston, and going all the way back to the Mamie McFaddin Ward home in Beaumont. When we last visited Louisiana just a few years ago our itinerary then was Lafayette and Baton Rouge, where we toured Magnolia Mound. All of these come highly recommended if you like that sort of thing. (Probably nothing tops all the antebellum homes one can go through in Natchez MS, which we've also done, but that's another post.) Oak Alley has been the scene of a handful of movies but today is set up mostly for tours and special events like weddings and the like. The 200-year-old oaks that line the approach are the most magnificent I have ever seen. The grounds and home reflect the period: old Southern charm ... if you were Caucasian and wealthy, of course. There's a listing of the 100+ slaves who lived and worked on the plantation, their names, ages, and value recorded in a county archived tax disclosure filed in 1848.

Our fancy dinner Wednesday was one of the old-timers we had not yet been to: Arnaud's. I thought I was going to have the courtbouillon posted on the website as part of the ~~Vermillion~~ Reveillon Dinner menu, but when we were seated I was told that the prix-fixe had gone away after Christmas. Good news: it was replaced by a better and less expensive one. So we both had Shrimp Arnaud to appetize us; camarones frio doused in their renowned special remoulade. I picked the shrimp creole and Mrs. Diddie went for the pork tenderloin Robichaux, which was finished with a quick sear in the skillet to give it a little crunch on the edges. We closed with suitably decadent and diabetes-enhancing desserts: pecan pie a la mode (pecan praline ice cream) and profiterole, a pastry filled with vanilla ice cream and drenched in chocolate syrup. Hope my doctor isn't reading this.

Thursday I let the wife sleep in and wandered the Quarter before trucking back to the Dauphine for the complimentary breakfast (at least it was little healthier) and then we made Eat New Orleans for lunch (crawfish boulettes, butterbeans with shrimp, red beans and rice with sausage) before our Treme' tour.

It was really one of the best tours I have ever done, in NOLA or anywhere else. Our guide started us at the old J&M recording studio -- which is now, ridiculously enough, a washateria -- where proprietor Cosimo Matassa played host to the legends of the music of the time: Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Allen Toussaint, Jerry Lee Lewis, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Guitar Slim, and many more. From there we moved into the historic African-American neighborhood to the north of the French Quarter and the scene of the HBO series of the same name. The Treme' has been gentrified somewhat since the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina, but remains mostly a lower middle-class AA neighborhood and the center of the city's historical music and culture. Much of the early (as in pre-Civil War) struggles for civil rights were waged here, and after the Anglo-Americans took over from the French -- and before them, the Spanish -- in 1803, black people had quite obviously a much more miserable existence. Slave auction houses were prevalent, the War of 1812 where Andrew Jackson's ragtag bunch repelled British forces cemented the Americans' stranglehold on the port city, and Louisiana became a state of the Union later that year.

Things got no better until the Civil War of course, and even up to the 1960s, when the construction of Interstate 10 bisected the Treme' just as it did Old South Baton Rouge, and virtually everywhere else the highway was built in the cities -- right through the minority neighborhoods -- and the area continued to suffer the erosion of its culture and heritage. Post-Katrina, the neighborhood is getting some attention and investment to preserve its legacy. There's a wonderful African American Museum on Governor Nicholls Street, housed in Treme' Villa, one of the city's best examples of an authentic Creole mansion.

On our way back we went past Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop but were too tired to even stop for a drink, preferring a nap instead before dinner. We walked just a block away from the Dauphine to Louisiana Bistro, where the wife had a lip-smackingly delicious puppy drum and I finally had the elusive courtbouillion. Another really magnificent meal.

On the way back to Houston on Friday we stopped again in Lake Charles at the Isle of Capri so Mrs. Diddie and Mother Diddie could feed the slots. We all hit the buffet and I sacrificed, having a large salad, the only vegetables I consumed all week.

When we picked up the furkids at the PetsHotel, we got those looks that said, "You went to New Orleans and didn't bring us a doggy bag?!"

More Dallas bath and toilet water headed for Houston

2011-12-27T18:09:00.000-06:00

It has long been a joke to those who know where Houston gets its water: take a drink from a tap in Houston and say ‘thank you’ to your friends in Dallas for flushing their toilets and doing all the other things that create a city’s wastewater.

In fact, without the Dallas-Fort Worth wastewater, the drought may have nearly dried up the Trinity. Decades ago, that happened. But now, the Metroplex sends so much wastewater down the Trinity, even in the driest year in Texas, the river continues to flow. Which means the wastewater is far more concentrated.

The Trinity River Authority (TRA) said in a normal year, just one-eighth of the flow as it reaches Lake Livingston is Dallas-Fort Worth wastewater. But this summer, that wastewater accounted for one-half the flow.

Nevertheless, the plan to bring more of Dallas' delicious sewage to us surges ahead.

After decades of fits and starts, Houston is pushing forward with plans to move Trinity water nearly 30 miles to Lake Houston. The reservoir, located on the smaller San Jacinto River, fills the taps for millions of people in the region.

Planners say the Luce Bayou project, a nearly $300 million pipeline and canal, would provide water to the ever-swelling city and suburbs while helping with the area's planned conversion from groundwater. The newly adopted state water plan identifies it among the key strategies to slake the region's thirst in 2060.

Mmmmm. Pour me another glass. Of course it's not just the taste we'll have to acquire...

The project, they say, could invite too much growth, encourage more transfers from water-rich East Texas and damage native habitats along the Trinity and in the bay.

"This project is a game changer," said Brandt Mannchen, of the Sierra Club's Houston group. [...]

Critics say the state plan promotes more pumps, pipes, dams and canals ahead of saving existing water. Although the plan calls for 12 percent of the supply in 2060 to come from conservation, they say more could be done.

With Luce Bayou, "we will have capacity well into the future," said Jim Lester, a water policy expert at the Houston Advanced Research Center. "My fundamental problem with this is, we are doing so little on conservation."

The Sierra Club's Mannchen said the project continues an endless cycle of increasing water supply to meet growing demands. Eventually, Houston may be forced to go farther east to grab water from the Neches or Sabine, he said.

Another concern is the potential impact on one of the nation's most productive and commercially valuable bay and estuary systems.

Both the Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers empty into Galveston Bay, but at different points. The bay's northernmost lobe likely will become saltier with less water from the Trinity, experts said.

Conservation? Rainwater capture and purification? No thanks. We'll just build another pipeline and drink Dallas' wastewater. And pay the city of Houston a hundred bucks a month for the privilege.

Oh well, maybe the radiation will kill us all quicker than we think, and we won't have to worry about these long-term projects.

The Last Weekly Wrangle of 2011

2011-12-26T14:50:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes everyone is enjoying their holiday as it brings you the last roundup of the year.

Last week's House Republican cave-in on the payroll tax cut extension is intertwined with the Keystone XL pipeline: both have to be decided upon again in 60 days. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has some discussion about the implications.

Bay Area Houston thinks maybe Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg should resign.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted the Occupy Houston response to felony charges for some Occupy protestors who took part in civil disobedience at the port of Houston. This is a matter that should be of concern to all progressives, political advocacy groups, and civil libertarians.

Federal court judge Sam Sparks gave an early Christmas present to Texas microbreweries and their customers last week. Off the Kuff explains.

At TexasKaos, Lightseeker reports on the end of the year signs that the war on public education is reaching a critical juncture. Read his report: Public Education in the Crosshairs - Is This the End?

Texas Republicans disallow a crony capitalist tax break letting public schools keep money. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme can tell it's election season. You know Republicans love their cronies and hate public education.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson says it's time for the people to be the focus of our politics and government, and we must start doing what's good for the people of Texas.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is very pleased with Congressman Lloyd Doggett. The Texas Republicans are still trying to mess with Lloyd's district. Bosskitty shares an example of how Lloyd responded to an email concerning the HR 10 vote: UPDATE: Response to HR 10 Consequences

Season's Greetings from the cartoonists

2011-12-25T08:35:00.000-06:00

Only Romney and Paul make VA primary ballot

2011-12-24T11:18:00.001-06:00

One last bit of politics before Christmas.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have failed to qualify for Virginia's March 6 Republican primary, a setback in their bids for the Republican presidential nomination.

The Republican Party of Virginia announced the developments Friday and early Saturday, saying that the two have failed to submit the required 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot.

That Gingrich and Perry failed to get on the ballot in this state that votes on Super Tuesday underscored the difficulty that first-time national candidates — many with smaller campaign operations and less money — have in preparing for the long haul of the campaign.

It also illustrates the advantage held by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He's essentially been running for president for five years, and his team, smaller than in 2008 but larger than most of his 2012 opponents, has paid close attention to filing requirements in each state. He will appear on the Virginia ballot, along with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who also has run a national campaign before.

The significance of this development shouldn't be understated.

As mentioned here previously, the GOP primaries are apportioning delegates by percentage instead of winner-take-all until April 1. So theoretically the fight for the nomination could go on well into the summer -- though I doubt all the way to the convention. It might be the case usually that this would drain resources from the frontrunner(s), but Romney can self-fund and Paul's Army isn't close to maxing out.

With Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida on the calendar in January and Nevada, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, Arizona, and Michigan in February -- and Washington state on the Saturday before Super Tuesday -- those trailing a field that looks increasingly like it will be led by Romney and Paul appear to have few opportunities to break through.

Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman have very narrow paths to victory left to them, and not just for the most obvious reasons (Reason #1. They're freaks and morons). A deck that once appeared stacked to the advantage of second-tier candidates now looks like it's against them.

Perry is particularly disadvantaged by the moving of the Texas primary from March to April due to the Texas attorney general's legal machinations. He would win it handily in either month, but April (even with him winning all the delegates) is probably too late to help him.

Barring anything more shocking than Dr. No being an embarrassingly obvious bigot, I see this as a two-horse race. How long do the Teas stay lined up with Paul -- or pull out and start clamoring for a third-party challenge -- is the last question left to answer.

The House Republican cave-in and Keystone XL

2011-12-23T08:07:00.000-06:00

Part of the payroll tax cut extension deal (that the House GOP came to their senses on last night) is that Obama must fast-track the decision on the tar sands pipeline. It would be on the same deadline -- 60 days -- as the tax cut extension itself. The good news is that this gives the president a golden opportunity to kill Keystone XL. For now, and perhaps for good.

Which may be exactly what the GOP wants: a bat to beat Obama with in 2012 over the economy. But that apparently isn't going to work, either.

House Republicans keep trying to give President Obama a political black eye by wielding the 36-inch diameter Keystone XL pipeline as a cudgel just before Christmas.

Instead, they could end up severely maiming only themselves if they persist with end-of-year legislative theatrics at what some are referring to as the "Capitol Hill Playhouse" this week.

"It's quite a sandbox, isn't it?" Pat Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor who specializes in Congress and environmental issues, told InsideClimate News. "I think their strategy has backfired and that they've roped themselves with this political gambit. This idea that you have to keep introducing ideology into every issue, that will be their undoing." [...]

This angle developed last week on 'Countdown', but the House GOP's Epic Fail Follies drowned it out.

(skip to the 2:20 mark if you don't need the background, current at the time of this video just to last week, with the Senate's passage of the payroll tax bill)

More on the scam that is Keystone XL with respect to jobs, where the refined oil is going, how it will raise oil prices on the world market AND avoid paying US taxes (bold emphasis is mine):

One of the most important facts that is missing in the national debate surrounding the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is this – Keystone XL will not bring any more oil into the United State for decades to come. Canada doesn’t have nearly enough oil to fill existing pipelines going to the United States. However, existing Canadian oil pipelines all go to the Midwest, where the only buyer for their crude is the United States. Keystone XL would divert Canadian oil from refineries in the Midwest to the Gulf Coast where it can be refined and exported. Many of these refineries are in free trade zones where they may be exported to the international buyers without paying U.S. taxes. And that is exactly what Valero, one of the largest potential buyers of Keystone XL's oil, has told its investors it will do. The idea that Keystone XL will improve U.S. oil supply is a documented scam being played on the American people by Big Oil and its friends in Washington DC.

Canada's excess pipeline capacity is well known. In a Department of Energy report evaluating Keystone XL's impacts on U.S. energy supply over the next twenty years, the agency found that it will take decades for Canada to produce enough oil to fill existing pipelines. On page 90, the report concludes that the United States will import the same amount of crude from Canada through 2030 whether or not Keystone XL is built.

From Canada's perspective, the problem with existing pipelines is they all end in the U.S. Midwest and only allow one buyer - the United States. As Canada's Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently said, "we export 97 percent of our energy to the U.S. and we would like to diversify that." However, the Canadian government has put the breaks on the two pipeline proposals to export tar sands through its provinces due to the need to take more time to listen to its own public's concerns about water and safety. Keystone XL would be Canada’s first step in diversifying its energy market. The pipeline would divert large volumes of Canadian oil from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast, where it would be available for the first time to buyers on the world market. To sweeten the deal, many of the refineries on the Gulf Coast happen to be located in foreign trade zones, where they can export Canadian oil to the world market without paying U.S. taxes.

Oil Change International investigated this issue in a report that found the Keystone XL pipeline was part of a larger strategy to sell increasing volumes of Canadian crude on the international diesel market.When Canadian regulators at the National Energy Board (NEB) considered the Keystone XL proposal in 2008, they asked TransCanada to justify another pipeline when there was already so much spare capacity. TransCanada conceded that Keystone XL would take oil from existing pipelines, increasing shipping costs. However, TransCanada argued that this cost would be more than offset as shifting Canadian oil from the Midwest to the Gulf would increase the price that Americans paid for Canadian oil by $3.9 billion.

So let's review: Keystone XL will raise oil prices, dodge paying taxes, create only a handful of temporary construction jobs and further destroy the environment. What's not to like (if you're a Republican)? If Obama can't win this debate with the GOP in the court of public opinion... well, he deserves to lose.

For the first time in a long time, I am hopeful that Keystone XL is not going to happen.

Look! The GOP finally found some voter fraud!

2011-12-23T07:00:00.002-06:00

Unfortunately, they found it in the Indiana Secretary of State's office. Who happens to be a Republican.

Separately, (IN SOS Charlie) White still faces seven criminal felony charges, including three of them for voter fraud, related to the fact that he did not live at the address where he was registered to vote in the 2010 election. As he was not a properly registered Indiana voter, he was not eligible to be a candidate on the ballot, Rosenberg has ruled. Moreover, at the time of his election, White was a member of the Fishers Town Council --- a town in which he no longer lived since separating from his wife and moving out of her house, where he remained registered to vote, several years earlier. Democrats charge he retained his registration at the house so that he could continue to collect his salary as a Council Member.

Since divorcing his wife White had remarried and purchased a condominium in a different town, but claimed the reason he stayed registered at his former wife's house was because he had hoped to move back some day. The Indiana Recount Commission accepted that explanation. The Marion County Circuit judge, apparently, did not.

Earlier this week, in the criminal case, White also received bad news. according to the Indiana Star, "A Hamilton County judge Monday denied a motion by White to dismiss his felony charges, which were filed against him earlier this year. His criminal trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 30. Felons are ineligible to serve as Secretary of State." Merry Christmas, Mr. White.

And to all (Republicans who believe in the mythological Demon of Democratic voter fraud), a good night.

Two Christmas presents for the environment

2011-12-22T07:00:00.003-06:00

Texas environmental regulators have rejected Valero Energy Corp.'s request for a tax break that cities, counties and school districts feared would lead to devastating cuts to their budgets.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality denied the request because the San Antonio-based oil giant could not show an environmental benefit at its six Texas refineries from the equipment at the center of its application for the tax break.

Texas law provides property tax exemptions for equipment that reduces pollution at the refinery. Valero, however, sought a tax break for hydrotreaters, which are used to produce low-sulfur fuels. In this case, the lower emissions come at the tailpipe.

If TCEQ had granted the exemption, Valero stood to gain up to $130 million a year in property tax relief from cities, counties and school districts, officials said. The company earned $1.2 billion in profits for the most recent quarter, its best quarterly results in four years.

"It's a nice Christmas gift to many cities, counties and school districts around the state that would have had to shell out millions to a rich oil company," said Matthew Tejada, executive director of Air Alliance Houston. "Justice and logic can still prevail in the state of Texas."

One more excerpt from that.

Hydrotreaters account for more than $1 billion of taxable property value in Harris County alone. That is nearly $7 million a year toward county services and about $2 million a year for the Houston Independent School District, according to the Harris County Appraisal District.

TCEQ is not renowned for doing the right thing in favor of our environment and against Big Oil, so they deserve credit here for a good call.

And there's this:

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced (yesterday) an important new rule that finally sets limits on mercury, arsenic, and other toxins released into our air. For 21 years, coal-fired power plants were allowed to unleash unlimited mercury and other toxic pollution, poisoning the air. Today’s rule requires power plants to update their pollution-control technology to keep 90 percent of mercury produced by burning coal from being released.

Click that link and read more about the health impact...

Mercury especially endangers children and pregnant women, damaging young brain development. But children in communities of color suffer most from a delay in cleaner air — African-American and Latino children are 60 percent more likely to have asthma attacks than whites. Nationwide, mercury pollution alone causes up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks annually, while coal power plants produce 2.5 pounds worth of airborne toxins for every American each year.

...and that the wailing about the lights going out from conservatives is, as usual, false:

Coal defenders like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have rallied around inaccurate assertions that the EPA rule is a threat to electric reliability because they claim it will force many existing power plants to close. An Associated Press survey of power plants has debunked this claim. AP could not find a single plant operator that solely blamed EPA rules for a plant closure. Instead, it found the average age of plants that could be mothballed is 51 years. A number of utilities executives agree there will be little impact on reliability as the industry moves to meet new standards.

A very Merry Christmas to Texans' -- and Americans' -- lungs.

A third party you can disregard: Americans Elect

2011-12-22T06:10:00.002-06:00

I opened a conversation last week about third-party candidates, and lately it seems that everyone else is catching on (and catching up). Today's lesson is that there is one third-party movement to be avoided, and it's Americans Elect. First, some background.

Americans Elect is a collection of Republicans, Democrats and independents who say they are frustrated with the polarization that has caused U.S. politics to seize up and are looking for a unity ticket that would help the political process run more smoothly and responsively.

“It’s going to happen,” said Mark McKinnon, the Austin-based strategist who crafted the George W. Bush message in 2000 and 2004, but backed Barack Obama in 2008. “The system is completely paralyzed, and people have lost confidence in all the institutions of government and the political parties. And things are getting worse.”

McKinnon also is one of the founders of No Labels, a centrist organization that seeks to nurture the “politics of problem solving” and to create space so lawmakers can work with counterparts across the aisle.

No surprise; they want good old Dr. No. (Everybody wants that racist gasbag, except for those Americans of all political persuasions with the slightest remaining sanity).

The name most frequently connected to a third-party presidential effort is no centrist: It’s Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas.

Paul insists he has no intention of running for president as a third-party candidate. Now seeking the Republican nomination, he was the Libertarian Party candidate in 1988.

Talking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week, however, he seemed to leave the door slightly ajar.

“I don’t like absolutes — I don’t like to say: ‘I absolutely will never do such and such’ — so I am just avoiding the absolute,” Paul said.

George Will ain't buyin' it -- and is scared shitless.

So, assume three things. That Obama is weaker in 2012 than he was when winning just 53 percent of the vote in 2008. That Paul could win between 5 percent and 7 percent of the vote nationally (much less than the 18 percent that a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed were prepared to vote for Paul as an independent). And that at least 80 percent of Paul’s votes would come at the expense of the Republican nominee.

That link is worth reading start to finish; however let's move past this digression to Paul and return to Americans Elect.

What Americans Elect has done is fashion a new twist to the quadrennial quest for a credible third-party contender. Instead of an outside party, it has crafted a parallel nominating process: a nonpartisan online convention. Anyone with a valid ID and an Internet hookup is eligible to become a “delegate,” and candidates can either register by completing a questionnaire or be drafted by popular support. Through a series of online ballots, the slate of contenders will be whittled down to six in April, and then to a single winner in June. In keeping with the group’s shibboleths, the nominee must tap a member of a different party as a running mate, forming a “unity ticket” that will occupy the chasm in the political center.

For a political start-up, Americans Elect has Establishment-grade cash and credentials. Its roster is dotted with veterans of Washington warfare, both Democrats and Republicans, who have grown weary of both parties’ penchant for pandering to their fringes. Schoen recently authored a column that cast Occupy Wall Street as a “radical” uprising that was “dangerously out of touch” with American values. Another adviser, Mark McKinnon, served as George W. Bush’s media strategist but declined to reprise the role in 2008 out of respect for Obama. Also on the group’s board are a battery of business executives; Dennis Blair, Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence; and Christine Todd Whitman, the moderate former Republican governor of New Jersey. A framed column by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, which predicted that the group would do to politics “what Amazon.com did to books,” hangs in the hallway of its airy 10th-floor suite, from which you can glimpse a sliver of the White House three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue.

And there's the problem with AE: moneyed power brokers are behind the movement. And in the spirit of this cycle's Super PACs and Citizens United, you don't get to know who they are.

The dingbats behind “Americans Elect,” a shadowy centrist third-party effort to get an Internet petition onto actual presidential ballots, refuse to reveal who’s funding their efforts, because their donors are very worried that someone might call them dingbats.

That’s what reporters on an Americans Elect press call learned today, according to Dave Weigel. When Politico’s Ken Vogel began asking difficult questions about why the group hides its donors, a spokesperson said it was because of “fear of retribution.”

Americans Elect COO (and son of the group’s chairman) Elliot Ackerman explained what this “retribution” might look like:

But hang on: What sort of retribution were we talking about? “My father, Peter Ackerman,” offered the group’s COO Elliot Ackerman. “He’s been mischaracterized in the press frequently.”

Sragow wasn’t about to let this suggestion fly — this idea that working with AE wasn’t dangerous. “Don’t suggest that there is no retribution,” he said. “Nobody who’s spent 10 minutes in politics could think that.” He’d been vilified for participating in the group. He’d been attacked and insulted. “Fortunately, in this country, we don’t use molotov cocktails literally,” he said. “We use them figuratively.”

So! Random unknown billionaires will fix our politics by paying an unknown third-party candidate’s way onto our ballots, but we must never know who did this or why, because someone might “mischaracterize” them, with figurative Molotov cocktails. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

As with every other link here: follow it, read the whole thing, and follow the links there.

Now if this does sound like your bag, then just know that besides Ron Paul you'll likely have 'man of the people' choices like Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump to pick from.

The only way you'd be wasting your vote on a third-party candidate is if you paid any attention at all to whatever Americans Elect comes up with.

Something reeks in the Harris Co. DA's office

2011-12-20T05:45:00.001-06:00

And no, it's not the immanent smell of spilled beer and cigarette smoke.

A prosecutor who last week refused to answer questions from a grand jury said Monday she is the target of political forces aligned against her and her boss, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos.

"The fix is in," Rachel Palmer said from the witness stand. "It's really clear to anyone who is not already affected by bias."

Palmer asserted in a hastily called recusal hearing that state District Judge Susan Brown, her husband state District Judge Marc Brown and a special prosecutor appointed by the former were working together to unseat Lykos in a plot that has ensnared Palmer.

Parker appears to be something more than just a victim here IMHO. All of this grinning and smirking seems out of round.

Thursday's hearing was postponed until Monday when Palmer's attorneys moved to have Brown recused from the proceedings.

An administrative judge quickly appointed civil district judge Al Bennett to preside over a hearing on the request that is scheduled to continue early Tuesday.

In the wide-ranging motion, Palmer alleged a far-flung whisper campaign that included St. Martin's political support of one of Lykos's 2008 Republican primary opponents and interactions among Palmer, her politically active husband Don Hooper and the Browns.

"I'm afraid of Judge Brown," Palmer said on the stand.

Though in Palmer's defense, there is almost surely something fishy going on.

The man challenging Lycos in the Republican primary for district attorney happens to be married to the woman who performed the swearing-in of the grand jury forewoman (scroll about halfway down, and note that my style preference is to keep titles like these gender-specific) who wishes to compel Parker's testimony. And one of the special prosecutors appointed by Judge Brown at the grand jury's request, Stephen St. Martin, was a supporter of Lycos' challenger Kelly Siegler in 2008.

St. Martin donated a healthy $3,000 to Siegler’s campaign when she was fighting Lykos for the Republican nomination. Also, Lykos kicked him out of the Special Crimes Division of the DA’s Office, and then publicly snubbed him when the FBI gave him an award.

Talk about a bad Grisham novel. Sure, it's a stretch even for the conspiracy-inclined but if Big Jolly is scared, then you ought to be too. Unless you're not a Republican, in which case you need to go pop some more corn.

And just think: all this could have been avoided if Democrats had managed a few more votes for C.O. Bradford for DA in 2008.

Update: For those who have inquired... yes, that last was total sarcasm.

Paul Sadler to run for US Senate

2011-12-19T16:53:00.005-06:00

Just two days after fellow Democrat Ric Sanchez dropped out of the race, state Rep. Paul Sadler of Henderson has filed to run for U.S. Senate. [...]

Two Democrats have filed: Sean Hubbard and Daniel Boone. But the big name until last week was Sanchez, a retired lieutenant general who once led U.S. forces in Iraq. His campaign never got traction. That and personal troubles — his home burned down over the Thanksgiving holiday — prompted him to get out.

Sadler, in a brief telephone interview, said he has been thinking about the race since Hutchison announced her decision. Sanchez's announcement last week tipped the scales, and he filed with the Texas Democratic Party this afternoon.

Sadler was elected to the House in 1990 and served through 2002, ending his tenure with three terms as chairman of the Public Education committee. While George W. Bush was governor, Sadler chaired the special committee that worked on the tax bill Bush proposed as a remedy for public education problems. He lost a runoff election in 2004 to Republican Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, in a race for the Texas Senate.

Sadler has a solid background in both business and politics.

Sadler is the Executive Director of The Wind Coalition. The Wind Coalition is a non-profit association formed to encourage the development of the vast wind energy resources of the south central United States. The Wind Coalition is active in two particular regions: ERCOT and SPP. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the electric transmission grid covering most of Texas. The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) grid covers all or parts of seven unique states: Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. As the Executive Director, Paul is responsible for the policy and regulatory development concerning wind energy in eight states. [...]

(He) served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1991 - 2003. During his tenure in the Texas House of Representatives, he served on numerous committees including Education, Judiciary, Pensions and Investments, Health and Human Services, Calendars and was one of eight members designated to the Legislative Budget Board. His most significant committee work, however, was in the area of education. Sadler served on the House Public Education Committee from 1993 - 2003 (serving as Chairman of the committee from 1995 - 2003), chairman of the Select Committee on State Revenue and Public School Finance in 1997, and chairman of the Select Committee on Public School Employee Health Insurance in 2001. Paul was the only house member to serve as chair of more than one committee in the same session; he had dual chairmanships in two sessions in 1999 & 2001. His accomplishments include the re-write of the Education Code in 1995 (known as the 'Ratliff-Sadler Act'); enactment of public school employee health insurance for the first time in the history of the state; passage of a $3.8 billion education package, which at the time included the largest property tax cut in the history of the state; provided teacher pay raises for three consecutive sessions for the first time in the history of the state; established critical need programs for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten; the ninth grade initiative targeting students at risk of drop-out; and increased funding for public school facilities.

This part is interesting:

As then-Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry stated, "What the Legislature is all about (is) competing interests coming together and splitting differences. Unless it's education -- then you do everything that Paul wants." Sadler has received numerous awards for his legislative work. He was singled out by Texas Monthly during each of his legislative terms, being named to the Ten Best List in 1995, 1997, 1999 and 2001.

Here's more from Sadler on the prospects of wind energy. And here's more from him on the past legislative session's education woes. And here's what he said about working with George W. Bush when he was governor:

Long before Bush wrote his book (Decision Points), former state Rep. Paul Sadler wondered aloud how his friend would handle the consequential choices to come.

Sadler, an East Texas Democrat who worked with Bush on education, had an early impression of the governor's management style. As governor, Bush was particularly susceptible to a small coterie of advisers around him, what Sadler calls "the voices in the room.''

"He surrounds himself with people who were largely likeminded," Sadler said. "Look for the dominant personality in the room. He will trust that dominant personality." [...]

Sadler believes the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake, driven by a circle of single-minded advocates. And he said Bush, following Rove's hard-nose politics, abandoned his promise to stem the hyper-partisanship of Washington.

"The ultimate responsibility has to rest with him," Sadler said, but he wonders whether history - and the Bush legacy - might have been different had he been less susceptible to the dominant voices in the room.

"I still consider him a personal friend and I hesitate to criticize him," Sadler said. "But those of us who were friends and who are friends, over the years we have said many times, who hijacked our friend? Who hijacked him?"

Can't say I'm thrilled about the part in bold.

Sadler sounds like the perfect TDP establishment candidate: East Texas conservaDem, good record in the Lege (especially if you consider that part about the property tax reduction good), been in the renewable-energy business since losing his last election.

No excuse why he can't raise all the money he needs to win from the Texas Democratic lawyers, unlike Chris Bell and even Bill White. Right?

Update: The Chron has this...

"We have a reputation as a state for business. We have a senator who's good for business. It's time for us to have a senator that's good for the people of this state," Sadler said. "That's what I'm going to be doing."

Update II: From the end of the filing day yesterday comes word that Jason Gibson of the Houston Trial Lawyers Association and Eric Roberson, who ran previously for Congress in the 32nd District (Plano area) in 2008 and aborted a campaign for the statehouse in 2010, have also filed for this race.

Update III: Roberson clarifies that he is actually running for a seat on the Fifth District (Dallas) Court of Appeals, Place 11.

T'was the Week before Christmas Wrangle

2011-12-19T06:32:00.001-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance is all about the wassailing as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff has a look at candidate filings in Harris County as of what was once the deadline date.

BossKitty at TruthHugger sees the grim side of a corporate-ruled America; the climate change controversy may be a conspiracy and we are the targets.

BlueBloggin notes that special interests are really not very special when they represent the mindless, dangerous attitudes of corporate extremists who don't want to be accountable for their actions. Let Me Sell you A Lie: EPA Consequences of HR 10 aka the REINS Act shows that corporations really do own America's lawmakers.

Bay Area Houston calls Rick Perry one rotten bastard.

Death sentences and the use of the death penalty are at a record low, mostly because of the corruption and injustice in our criminal justice system. It's led WCNews at Eye On Williamson to wonder: is the death penalty dying?

Third-party presidential candidates may make some noise and perhaps even some news in 2012, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw gives us the heads-up on the latest episode of Rick Perry, fraud and hypocrite. Check out Double Dipping Rick the Hypocrite.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes Greg Abbott asked the US Supreme Court to poop on Texas' politicians and voters. That's a Republican for you.

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote a post considering the life of the real St. Nicholas. Jolly old St. Nick was a foe of the death penalty who was said to have brought back to life children who had been cut up and were going to be pickled.

McBlogger takes on PolitiFact's pathetic attempt to beat up Congressman Lloyd Doggett.

Refinish69 from Doing My Part For The Left wonders Do They Know It's Christmas in Washington ... or anywhere else in the world.

Sunday Funnies

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-06:00

Your Christmas gift is that there will be no more debates

2011-12-16T08:30:00.001-06:00

Gingrich, Romney ready for Iowa sprint:

Given his likely strength in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary, Romney may be able to survive a so-so finish in Iowa. It appears more important for Gingrich to win Iowa, or come close, and Thursday's two-hour televised debate in Sioux City probably helped his cause.

It wasn't so much that the former House speaker had a solid second hour after a somewhat shaky start. It's more that Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texan, expressed his anti-war, anti-interventionist views so vehemently that he may have turned off mainstream Republicans who otherwise might have helped him to a surprising first-place finish.

My favorite line, from Dr. No ...

"Do terrorists go to Switzerland and Sweden to commit terrorism? No, we're bombing them."

He has been stealing this joke from Osama bin Laden for some time now. It's also not factual. Speaking of untruths:

"I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt." -- Newt Gingrich

Gingrich was off on both claims concerning the budget. The budget was indeed balanced for four years, but it’s a stretch for him to take credit for more than two of those years (since he was no longer in Congress). As for paying off $405 billion in debt, the data we found shows the debt actually increased during Gingrich’s four-year tenure as speaker by more than $800 billion.

I think Mitt Romney has to be feeling a lot better about his prospects this morning.

Roundup of some highly readables

2011-12-15T06:20:00.006-06:00

With a little extra downtime on my hands as a result of my stepmother's passing Tuesday, and with all arrangements completed and awaiting services and committal Saturday, here is some of what I am reading this morning to share with you.

-- Michael Li has everything you want to know with respect to the latest on the Supreme Court's Texas election clusterfudge. That's a good half-hour's worth alone.

-- Rahm Emanuel is a thug. And like my friend Neil, I hope Occupy takes over his town next May.

-- Seven Occupy the Port of Houston protestors were released yesterday after a judge ruled that an arm tube was insufficient evidence to represent a felony charge of using "anything" in the act of civil disobedience.

There is justice occasionally, and sometimes it is sweeter than a clementine.

-- Plumes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times worse than carbon dioxide, are streaming into the atmosphere as Arctic permafrost thaws. It's pretty much over for humans (and the rest of most living things) on this planet now. The only question left is how much longer do we have.

-- Finally, in the context of a) not ending this post on a depressing note, and b) offering a bit of comedic value besides a toon, there is yet another GOP not-so-presidential debate tonight on Fox moderated by something called a Cavuto.

Hilarity should ensue. Seriously.

Update: Oh yeah, one more thing: There is Only One Issue in America, according to Steven Van Zandt. As a disciple, he is of course correct.

Third-party presidential candidate news

2011-12-13T19:20:00.005-06:00

Because no one else will ever blog about it.

Glenn Beck, Joe Scarborough tout Ron Paul as third-party candidate:

Some conservative commentators are laying the groundwork for backing Texas congressman Ron Paul as a third party candidate if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich to face Democratic President Barack Obama. Even as many on the right warm to the liberty-loving lawmaker, more of the mainstream media is beginning to consider him a factor in the GOP primary battle already underway.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and longtime Gingrich critic, today spoke favorably about a possible Paul general election candidacy as a reaction to “big government” conservative Gingrich. The co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program invoked the words of conservative radio show host Glenn Beck in welcoming a potential Paul insurgency in the 2012 general election.

“Yesterday, Glenn Beck said something that I guarantee you a lot of small-government conservatives, like me, have thought. And that is, if I have to choose between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, a guy that George Will said would have been a ‘marvelous Marxist’ and who is the opposite of being a small-government conservative — if Ron Paul’s running as a third-party candidate, I’m going to give him a long look. Because I can’t vote for the two guys who worship at the altar of big government in their own separate ways. And that’s the problem with a Newt Gingrich candidacy. He’s not a small government conservative.”

Really, it makes perfect sense. But Paul still has a shot at scrambling the GOP race if he wins Iowa. He trails Newt in the latest poll there by a single point.

Over the past week, Gingrich's 9-point lead has shrunk to a single point over the folksy Paul, according to Public Policy Poling.

Gingrich is clinging to a narrow 22% to 21% edge over Paul, with Mitt Romney at 16%, Michele Bachmann at 11%, Rick Perry at 9%, Rick Santorum at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 5%, and Gary Johnson at 1%.

Gingrich has dropped 5 points in the last week and he's also seen a significant decline in his favorability numbers.

Republican-leaning independents are going to need some place to go if Gingrich -- or for that matter, Paul -- should manage to capture the GOP nom.

But all that's hardly actual third-party news.

The Green Party's leading candidates for president, Kent Mesplay and Jill Stein, held a debate in California two weeks ago. Stein will appear at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a public interview with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive this Friday.

Harry Braun, running initially as a Democratic challenger to President Obama and now as an independent, has a campaign focusing on a democracy constitutional amendment that will in turn enable fossil and nuclear fuels to be replaced with wind and solar-based hydrogen systems "on a war-time speed" basis. He has a weekly radio show where he elaborates on these and other of his issues.

My thoughts on the ineptitude of continuing to support all of the candidates of the leftish member of the two-party duopoly were posted here last week. My argument in favor of third parties is: what have you got to lose? If you're a Republican and the party nominates someone you can't support, your vote for a third party candidate, be it Libertarian or Constitution or some other is a message to the GOP to shape up. Likewise -- and particularly since this is Texas, where your presidential vote isn't going to matter anyway -- you can send a message to the Democrats to get their shit together.

Go ahead and vote for the Republicans and/or Democrats (or Libs or Greens) down the ballot that you prefer. But until we get more choices everywhere, nothing meaningful is going to change.

Update: I wrote this post intending to include this news about Rocky Anderson.

A new political party has entered the fray as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans ahead of the 2012 elections. On Monday, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson announced he will run for president with the newly formed Justice Party. Although hailing from a solidly red state, Anderson has been known as one of the most progressive mayors of any major U.S. city in recent years. During his two mayoral terms from 2000 to 2008, Anderson was an outspoken champion of LGBT rights, environmental sustainability, and the antiwar movement in opposition to the Iraq War. Vowing to fight the influence of money over politics, Anderson kicked off his campaign on Monday with a pledge to limit individual donations to $100 a person. Anderson and the Justice Party say they hope to build a grassroots movement heading into the November 2012 elections. "We launched the Justice Party because the entire system is so corrupt," Anderson says. "It’s so diseased. We know that the public interest is not being served by anyone in the system right now, particularly the two dominant parties who have sustained this corrupt system and who are sustained by it."

Anti-incumbent fever sweeps out city hall

2011-12-12T18:30:00.003-06:00

If voters were happy with (Houston's) mayor and current city council, they certainly didn't show it in runoff elections Saturday.

They threw out two incumbents by large margins and filled two other seats with men who had no government experience.

The results illustrate a continuation of a national trend of anger and frustration toward government during the worst economic stretch since the Great Depression, political observers said.

In short: Voters want change.

"A lot of people are angry at virtually all institutions and the government is high on their list," said Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston. "And these are the people in a low-turnout election that are most likely to show up because they are angry. They're agitated."

About 57,000 voters participated in the election, 6 percent of the 920,000 people registered to cast ballots in Houston.

Yeah, the 6% want change, all right, and they're turning out in record (low) numbers to elect the very worst people on the ballot. This crew has burned through several labels in the past few years -- angry white males, TeaBaggers -- but suffice it to say that they have more time on their hands than they do good sense.

And the lower the turnout, the more incumbents are endangered. Which is why the King Street/True the Vote vote-suppressing criminals are fully weaponized for 2012.

Councilwoman Jolanda Jones lost At-Large Position 5 by 8 percentage points, and councilwoman Brenda Stardig suffered a 10-point defeat in District A. In races to replace term-limited council members Jarvis Johnson and Sue Lovell, voters chose a restaurateur, Jerry Davis, over one of Johnson's aides, Alvin Byrd, and picked a pastor, Andrew Burks Jr., over a former state legislator, Kristi Thibaut. Davis will represent District B, Burks will take At-Large 2.

The results show clear opposition to the status quo, particularly following a general election in which Mayor Annise Parker and several council members narrowly avoided runoff elections, said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University.

"It's a strong repudiation of this administration -- not just the mayor, but the council," Stein said.

District A, which elected the city's first TeaBagger, has a 57% Hispanic population. Barely any of which can vote, or bothered to. Byrd and Thibaut weren't incumbent office-holders but suffered the same fate as Jones and Stardig because they were perceived by the slight majority of the 6% as such.

Even without a 600,000-vote suppression tool like the TXGOP's Voter/Photo ID bill, 2012 is shaping up as an absolutely brutal year for incumbents of both parties, and that includes candidates who resemble incumbents by virtue of their prior proximity to the corridors of power.

As we wait for the court to give us some extended filing deadlines, that's something else to think about for those considering running for any office ... in any party.

Update: Charles disagrees. At least until he gets his numbers, anyway.

Occupy the Port of Houston today

2011-12-12T08:00:00.004-06:00

On Monday, December 12, Occupy Houston will be joining our brothers and sisters in the Occupy movement around the United States in a coordinated action targeting the nation’s ports. This event is an expression of solidarity with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and West Coast truck drivers who have come under attack this year, as well as a statement against the multinational conglomerates and their relentless campaign to outsource American jobs and undermine our economy in the pursuit of ever-widening profit margins. We will be joined here in Houston by hundreds of Occupiers and concerned citizens from all over the state, including Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth.

12:00 PM:    Meet up at Tranquility Park

1:00 – 3:00 PM: Rally at POH Offices. we will be protesting outside the security perimeter where the Port of Houston Authority’s executive offices are located, 111 East Loop. (77029)

4:00 – 6:00 PM: Main Street March. From Tranquility Park on down the length of downtown Main Street in a visible display of support for the West Coast Port Shutdown effort and the American working class.

Here is an approximate breakdown of the day’s lineup:

12:00 PM    Meet up at Tranquility Park to get the caravan ready
12:30 PM    Make our way over to the POH executive offices
(111 E. Loop, map link)
1:00 PM       Gather up at the gate and start protesting
2:30 PM Start heading back to the cars
3:00 PM      Get back to Tranquility Park
4:00 PM      Head out for “Main Street March” during rush hour
6:00 PM    Wrap up the march in time for dinner and the 7PM General Assembly

Occupy. Magnify. Amplify. Solidify.

Update: 19 20 arrested at Port of Houston

Update II:

"We are here in solidarity with the West Coast port shutdowns, but we're not here to shut down the port," said Amy Price, an Occupy Houston protester. "We don't want the Houston port workers to lose money. We just want to cause enough havoc to draw a spotlight on what's going on with our port. And the way to do that, we think, is civil disobedience."

The Weekly Wrangle

2011-12-12T07:40:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance hasn't really started its Xmas shopping yet as it brings you this week's roundup.

SCOTUS has issued a stay and scrambled the 2012 elections again. Off the Kuff tries to make sense of it.

BossKitty at TruthHugger notes that it's business as usual for Texas politicians to tilt the voter tables in their favor by gerrymandering: US Supreme Court May Like New Texas Gerrymandering.

Occupy went to Washington and comes to Houston on Monday, December 12. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs follows along.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that there's a corporate hand up the back of many GOP legislators in Texas: Texas GOP legislators are corporate puppets.

At TexasKaos Libby Shaw explans how the GOP is killing the U.S. economy and the American dream.

Neil at Texas Liberal made one post and then another detailing the recent trip of Green Houston City Council candidate Amy Price to Washington with Occupy Houston.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out the US Supreme Court for the corrupt hijacking of the Texas elections.

Sunday Funnies

2011-12-11T09:30:00.000-06:00

Supreme clusterfudge

2011-12-10T09:30:00.005-06:00

Only because I'm spending this weekend with my family am I substituting the 'candy' for the copulation. I expect to never again hear conservatives complain about "activist judges".

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an emergency challenge by Texas Republicans to judge-drawn maps that would govern next year’s state and federal elections.

The justices (Friday night) temporarily blocked a lower court order that put the maps in place. The high court said it will hear the case on an expedited basis, with arguments Jan. 9.

I'm not going to interrupt any more of a wonderful weekend watching my lovely niece the advertising model marry the man of her dreams (the former and still-occasional fiddle player for Pat Green) thinking about the Supreme Court's patently ridiculous, precedent-setting decision to give Greg Abbott a hearing on the Texas GOP's law-breaking maps. I'll instead direct to those who have already expressed some measure of surprise and caution.

Michael Li: SCOTUS stays interim maps

It is unclear for the moment what this means for Texas elections. For now, there are no legally enforceable maps for state house, senate, or congressional districts, but filing for other races continues with a December 15 deadline. It’s not clear though whether the primary will be moved or will be bifurcated as the State of Texas has suggested.

It’s also unclear what this means for candidates who have filed for office or resigned from office in anticipation of filing. Will candidates be entitled to their filing fees back? Will candidates who resigned from office under ‘resign to run’ laws be entitled to rescind their decisions?

The order also leaves party organization somewhat in confusion since parties organize conventions and select national delegates by state senate districts or congressional districts.

The process of redrawing precinct boundaries also presumably has come to a halt. At the same time, the current precinct lines no longer can be used since the state has new state board of education districts and, in many counties, new county commission district lines- some of which split precincts. Should counties draw new precinct lines taking into account those new districts and seek preclearance of those lines? Will they have to do it all over again once the legislative and congressional maps come to rest?

So in other words, a practical mess whatever the merits of the case.

Li also links to SCOTUSblog (the best read of the potential implications) and Election Law Blog for additional legal reaction. Excerpt from ELB:

Given what the Court did, with no stated dissents, it is not clear why this had to wait until Friday at 7 pm eastern to issue.

More importantly, it is also not clear what is supposed to happen now in Texas. What districts can be used, if the districts crafted by the three-judge court are now “stayed pending further order of this Court?”

Off the Kuff: SCOTUS issues a stay

I have no freaking clue what comes next. Dozens of candidates have filed for offices, many of them have already raised and spent money, and they may wind up not being eligible for the district they have chosen to run for.

Burnt Orange Report: US Supreme Court Stays Congressional, Legislative Maps

And by "Texas" in that last paragraph, the AP means Attorney General Greg Abbott and hyper-partisan Republicans, whose argument can be summed up as "Waaaaaah!! The San Antonio courts didn't disenfranchise enough ~~Democrats~~ minority, young, and poor people! Antonin Scalia, fix it!"

Greg's Opinion: SCOTUS Stays

I’m a bit surprised that we still don’t have a sense of what this does to filing periods. I’m assuming that there has to be an open window for filing after the Supreme Court has anything to say, but it seems that we’re in enough of an unknown that there’s just no telling. It’s entirely conceivable that the SCOTUS could go through all of this exercise and not change a thing about the map. In theory that might seem to allow for March primaries, but the absentee ballots can’t be printed until things are finalized (another domino). But even if nothing changes, would there still be a re-filing period? Considering that Thursday is the deadline for filing, that may make for some very awkward and tough decisions.

Letters from Texas: What Friday night's SCOTUS TX redistricting ruling means

Most of all, however, I think that politicos of both Parties and all ilk should follow this one simple instruction: chill out. Without a doubt, lawyers and judges will soon be holding telephonic hearings, during which clarifications will be given, guidance be shared, and more will be revealed. Until then, there is simply nothing anyone can do besides enjoy their weekend.

I have substantial concerns, as the SCOTUS blog link intimates above, that this Court wishes to make some new law, which may include emasculating federal judge panels from correcting wrongs written by hyper-partisan state legislatures, and maybe even take a stab at killing the Voting Rights Act altogether.

But I'm taking Harold's advice. As Scarlett O'Hara said, "I'm not going to think about that ~~today~~ right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow."

Update: From Republican attorney Robert Miller's blog ...

I believe it highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will simply affirm the interim maps after its January 9 oral arguments. At this point, it appears that a majority of the Supreme Court intends to invalidate some or all of the San Antonio court’s interim maps.

The Supreme Court may also examine whether Section 5 of the VRA remains constitutional. The State of Texas has hinted at possibly bringing a constitutional challenge to Section 5 on the grounds that it usurps Texas’ sovereignty over its election system. Many observers believe that a majority of the Supreme Court has been waiting for a case to declare Section 5 of the VRA unconstitutional, and this may be it.

Yep.

David Stern really is trying to kill the NBA

2011-12-09T08:51:00.003-06:00

Light posting continuing through the weekend as niece's wedding and associated family celebrations culminate. -Ed.

This development yesterday stunned even me, and I'm not all that stunnable any more.

In a spectacular and unprecedented turn of events, the Rockets went from a massive overhaul of their roster to a mountain of wrecked plans.

The Rockets had reached agreement on a three-team deal to get center Pau Gasol from the Lakers, sending top scorers Kevin Martin and Luis Scola to the Hornets.

Hours later, the trade that the three teams involved considered a done deal and had been the key to the Rockets' plans was torn apart when the NBA stepped in and killed it.

The league rescinded the deal, then disputed reports that it acted because of objections by NBA owners to having the NBA-owned Hornets send star New Orleans guard Chris Paul to the Lakers.

I was prepared to be as disappointed about the trade's implications for the Rockets as I was about all of the Astros' offseason machinations (read this for some good news on that front) but for Stern to take an action like this is astounding. Stern is essentially the owner of the Hornets franchise since the league assumed control of the team following its financial difficulties (related to the city of New Orleans' own fate). Former NBA player Dell Demps runs the team day-to-day as GM, and a deal for the Hornet's star Paul has been developing ever since the atrocious owners' lockout of players finally ended.

It's not as if Stern came back from a weeks-long vacation after having forced the NBAPA to kneel before him and find that his fellow greed-consumed billionaires had made a mess in the kitchen. In fact, after showing the usual iron-will solidarity management always musters when their opponent is labor, a bunch of crybabies complained about the big, bad Lakers getting all the puzzle pieces, and Stern caved to them.

If a good trade is, as the cliché goes, one in which everyone wins, David Stern stepped in and with one overbearing, heavy-handed swipe, turned the Rockets’ three-team deal Thursday into one in which everyone loses. [...]

In a statement, league spokesmen explained that Stern stepped in because the NBA owns the Hornets and the NBA killed the deal “for basketball reasons.”

This was as opposed to the explanation absolutely everyone else believed, that league owners did not want the team they own to help the Lakers by sending them Chris Paul with Dwight Howard likely to follow. The explanation seemed even more ridiculous when Yahoo Sports got a hold of an email Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert sent to Stern. [...]

No matter what anyone thinks of how the deal would impact their team, killing it causes damage that starts with the trade and quickly spreads.

I'll let you click the links for the basketball implications. What I see is -- obviously -- more political.

David Stern got a lot of hosannahs from the exclusive club that employs him after he made the players knuckle under in the lockout. With some players going overseas -- and staying there, like Duke's Kyle Singler -- owners don't appear to see the long-term damage they did to their franchises in exchange for the short-term immediate profit. They are indeed counting on the fans to sulk and crumble for this season, maybe the next one, then forget all about the strife and come back, bringing their wallets with them.

While he may be right about that, the unintended consequence is that there will be a stronger market for professional basketball players outside the United States in the coming years. Purposely diminishing the value of the skill set in your labor force is a poor management strategy. Naturally Stern doesn't see it that way; he's got a gaggle of colicky one-tenth-of-one-percenters to coddle, after all. Damn the future, it's all about now. Sound like a familiar corporate refrain?

Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and the Lakers’ Mitch Kupchak spent countless hours hammering out the deal, as they and GMs around the league had been given the clear understanding that Demps was fully authorized to do his job with the only stipulation that he not exceed the luxury tax line.

They were also never told that they had to make a deal that would appeal not only to the teams involved, but to the commissioner.

While Stern is in no way qualified to judge the quality of players or trades, he ought to be able to do better than this as commissioner. Instead, he hammered the league’s credibility, actually living up to the sort of doubts that drive the conspiracy theorists.

One can assume that (Rockets owner) Leslie Alexander and (Lakers owner) Jim Buss have been calling Stern and hitting him as hard as he smashed their trade. But they are badly outnumbered. And as wrongfully as they must feel that their employee mistreated their teams, he did not do anywhere near the damage as to the team the NBA owns.

And not that he gives a shit, but there can't be a single NBA player sending Stern so much as moldy fruitcake for Christmas, much less a card.

It would serve him justly if all of the European stars the league has recruited and signed over the past few seasons eventually went back home. And took more Americans with them. Read more about Singler's decision to play in Spain long-term and the way the NBA's rookie salary cap affects late first- and early second-round draftees, and you can see where the owners have screwed the pooch.

Stern needs to organize a winter bowling league with Kirk Kerkorian and "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap so they can swap stories and laugh their asses off.

Because he seems to be worthless for anything else.

Update: Rejected Chris Paul Trade Prompts Expletive-Laden Tirade By Enraged NBA Executive

Some took it as proof the system, even after a five-month lockout, is still flawed, while others simply called the league a "complete joke."

But nobody has been as blunt as one anonymous NBA executive, who was quoted at length in a report on Yahoo! Sports.

"We were all told by the league he was a tradeable player, and now they're saying that [Hornets general manager Dell Demps] doesn't have the authority to make the trade?" the unnamed executive told Adrian Wojnarowski. "Now they're saying that Dell is an idiot, that he can't do his job. [Expletive] this whole thing.

"David's drunk on power, and he doesn't give a [expletive] about the players, and he doesn't give a [expletive] about the hundreds of hours the teams put in to make that deal."

Update II:

Multiple sources are reporting that the Chris Paul trade is not dead and still being worked on, as the NBA attempts to save face following Thursday's trade veto by David Stern.

Stern is going to try to get the Rockets to give the Hornets both Courtney Lee and Patrick Patterson in an attempt to sell that Lamar Odom's age made the original deal bad. It's absurd, but that's how they'll try to package it. How this ends is anybody's guess, but we're leaning toward Paul becoming a Laker through an altered trade of some type. Sadly, if the Lakers add anything else to this deal we'd veto it from their perspective and they will too. The only thing that is certain is that we're all dumber for having gone through this episode.

Occupy Congress today, Occupy the Gulf next Monday, Dec. 12

2011-12-06T20:20:00.003-06:00

Stay afraid, Frank Luntz.

Just a day after 31 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested after a clash with police in McPherson Square, a similar kind of demonstration is setting up camp on the National Mall.

Hundreds are expected to converge in Washington for a "Take Back the Capitol." On Monday demonstrators including members of OurDC, the unemployed, faith leaders, labor unions and others set up what they called "The People's Camp."

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) visited the camp. Referring to the Capitol, which she said has become overrun by Tea Party members, she told a crowd it was "time to take back the 'People's House' for the people."

Andrew Duke (C), Chief of Staff to Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, tells members of Good Jobs, Great Houston and other progressive groups "occupying" Hensarling's office that the Representative will not be able to meet with them in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC, Dec. 6.

At the heart of the movement is a similar message to Occupy Wall Street. The group says it wants Congress and elected leaders to represent the 99 percent of every day Americans, instead of the wealthiest 1 percent.

Unlike the tent cities by the "Occupiers," those taking part in "Take Back the Capitol" will only work out of their units during the day. They plan to sleep in area churches at night.

The group has the following tentative plans for the week:

- Tuesday: Visit congressional offices
- Wednesday: Swarm lobbying offices on K Street
- Thursday: Speak-outs throughout the Capitol, national prayer vigil and a mass march on key congressional leaders
- Friday: Pack up and head home

Organizers say they will continue the movement at home, where they will continue to pressure their local lawmakers.

Update: Neil has more, including an on-the scene-in-D.C. report from Houston city council candidate Amy Price.

Speaking of 'home':

In solidarity with Occupy Oakland, Occupy San Diego, Occupy LA, Occupy Portland, Occupy Tacoma, Occupy Seattle and other movements along the west coast of the United States that will shut down ports in their cities on December 12, the General Assembly of Dallas hereby declares:

On December 12, 2011, Occupy Dallas will assemble in Houston, TX.

The following message is from Occupy Oakland:

“On December 12, the occupy movements in different cities will stage mass mobilizations to march on the ports, create community pickets, and effectively shutdown the hubs of commerce, in the same fashion that Occupy Oakland shut down the Port of Oakland on November 2nd, the day of our general strike. The Oakland Port Shutdown was a historic and effective action, and the memory of that night on the port lives in the hearts of people across Oakland and around the country.”

In Houston, we will mobilize and stage a mass march by integrating Occupy Houston, Occupy Austin, Occupy San Marcos, Occupy San Antonio, Occupy Now and Occupy Texas.

We have made attempts at local demonstrations in an effort to spread awareness of the economic injustices affecting the 99%. These peaceful assemblies have been organized with the aim of petitioning our government for a redress of our grievances. On a national level, the response to our protest has often included excessive force and unnecessary violence perpetrated by police departments, with thousands of citizens unlawfully arrested.

Occupy Dallas would like to urge other movements in Texas and the surrounding states that wish to participate in the Occupy the Gulf Coast action to join with Occupy Houston before December 12.

Developing ...

Kristi Thibaut and Jolanda Jones for Houston City Council

2011-12-05T13:50:00.004-06:00

A solid 14,000 Houstonians have voted early in person or by mail in the December 10 runoff election for Houston city council. My post isn't likely to move any molehills, much less mountains, with respect to turnout or endorsement influence. Here it is anyway.

Kristi Thibaut, At Large #2: Let's begin by pointing out that Thibaut's opponent, Pastor Andrew Burks, is not only following the Gene Locke "Republicans plus African Americans" electoral strategy but also has a few other, shall we say, non-traditional items in his background, including a second arrest for DWI in 2010. From the Chron's take on the race last week:

Andrew Burks Jr. is harder to pin down. He's a lifelong black Democrat who ran once for chairman of the county party, yet he scored an A on the Texas Conservative Review's questionnaire and had the publication's endorsement for the general election when there were 10 candidates in the running.

Burks is endorsed by the (Harris) county Republican Party. Despite a claim on his Web site that he is endorsed by a former At-Large 5 candidate Laurie Robinson, she said she has not endorsed him.

[...]

Burks said he cannot remember how many times he has run for office. Chronicle research indicates this is his 12th run for public office and his seventh for a council seat. He also has run for state representative, Congress, county school board and party chairman. Two years ago, he took incumbent Sue Lovell to a runoff. Lovell, who is term-limited, endorses Thibaut.

[...]

Burks was under house arrest for 40 days last year following his second DWI conviction. Burks said he had not been drinking nor driving, but that he had been prescribed improper medication at a Veterans Affairs facility, where he was in a parked car at the time of his arrest.

Charles expands:

As a point of comparison, here’s the 2009 runoff overview story. The reason Burks has been endorsed by the GOP despite his “lifelong Democrat” status is likely because he welcomed the endorsement of Steven Hotze in the 2009 runoff. There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Andrew Burks, but that one would be sufficient for me. Beyond that, I just don’t know what to make of the guy. Like Griff, the impression I get is of a guy who’s running to run, not because he has some idea of what he wants to do if he wins. His finance reports are a mess, and he says ridiculous things – in that 2009 story, he talks about a “conspiracy of silence” that he can’t articulate. None of this is to say that he can’t win – he can, and he might. I just don’t know what we’ll get if he does.

The reason Burks might win is that he's black, and because another African American, Jolanda Jones, is also in an At Large runoff. Burks and Jones are as far apart philosophically as Jones and her runoff opponent Jack Christie, but for some voters, sadly, that won't matter. Also driving African American voters to the polls on December 10 is a runoff in District B between Alvin Byrd and Jerry Davis, and Republicans are getting boosted by District A's runoff between far-right incumbent Brenda Stardig and her farthest-right challenger Helena Brown.

Neil has more on Burks' bald-faced duplicity.

It's embarrassing that Burks even made it into the runoff with so many other qualified candidates, including a more qualified African American woman, Roz Shorter. It will be even more embarrassing if he wins.

Thibaut, by contrast, is honest, hard-working, and progressive. She was my co-endorsement last month out of ten challengers for the seat. She deserves to be elected. Burks does not. Simple as that.

Jolanda Jones, At Large #5: Again, a simple choice made even easier by Christie's smear mailer, which arrived in my mailbox on the day after Thanksgiving and even quoted Texas Liberal's Neil Aquino from the post in which he endorsed Jones. Hard to twist someone's words any tighter than that. That's the Republican way, though.

My fear is that the fate of Jones and Thibaut are somewhat linked. Either Democrats and progressives will get themselves to the poll to vote for them, or they'll get overcome by guaranteed GOP turnout. As for Thibaut, there's a double negative: there won't be many tickets split Thibaut/Christie, but likely to be many that go Burks/Jones.

As in the general election, I can offer no endorsement in District B, and because the only Democrat running in District A did not make that runoff, I can easily decline choosing between Stardig and Brown ... unlike Mayor Parker.

Update: Bob Ryan, the sensible Republican who ran in AL#5 against Christie and Jones, endorses the councilwoman for re-election.

“While I may not agree with all of Councilmember Jones’ positions, she is one of the few at City Hall that will stand up for the downtrodden, even when it’s one against fourteen.”

Ryan and Chris Bell trump the hell out of Bill White and Peter Brown IMO.

The cowardice of the Texas Democratic Party (or how I turned Bluish-Green)

2011-12-05T11:00:00.001-06:00

This is the post some of you have been asking me about. Casual political observers uninterested in the inside-baseball nature of internecine state party politics can skip to the end if you want the larger message.

Two weeks ago the Senate District Executive Committee of the Texas Democratic Party met in quarterly plenary session and cast some votes for resolutions to be placed on the March 2012 primary ballot. Those resolutions included the adoption of casino gambling in Texas (which was the only one the SDEC approved), support of marriage equality, abolishment of the death penalty, decriminalization of marijuana, and passage of the DREAM Act. You may read Karl-Thomas Musselman's live-blog of the session here for background and discussion prior to the voting. Most of you who have made it to this point are likely quite familiar with the proceedings, so I'll skip the details. As more backstory, I used to attend these meetings regularly and even live-blogged them myself a time or two before the rise of Twitter made such efforts obsolete. I long ago tired of the meetings, observing them as a glorified kaffeklatsche for retirees, sycophants, starfuckers, and budding politicos who were mostly uninterested in actually advancing Democratic policies or even helping Democrats get elected. It became apparent that election to the SDEC was more of a resume' enhancement or a legacy-burnishing or some similar ego stroke to the individual committee person; most of whom are in their dotage, some of the younger ones in a quest for actual political office.

That's not to say that the SDEC is entirely useless. Just mostly. What they are entirely is irrelevant (thanks for that observation to my friend Tom G).

A little historical digression is in order.

Feuding between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party is as old as the hills. It's why Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat for President in 1948. It's one of the reasons why John F. Kennedy came to Texas in November of 1963; to mitigate the quarreling between Gov. John Connally (another Democrat better remembered as a Republican these days) and Sen. Ralph Yarborough (an actual progressive). Many of these squabbles had their roots in civil rights. Here's an excerpt from Thurmond's Wiki page:

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. Army, proposed the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, supported the elimination of state poll taxes, and supported drafting federal anti-lynching laws. Thurmond became a candidate for President of the United States on the third party ticket of the States' Rights Democratic Party (aka Dixiecrats). It split from the national Democrats over what was perceived as federal intervention in the segregation practices of the Southern states, which, among other issues, had largely disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by constitutional amendments and electoral requirements from 1890 to 1910. Thurmond carried four states and received 39 electoral votes. One 1948 speech, met with cheers by supporters, included the following (audio at the link above):

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

Continuing on the timeline and moving back to Texas, Yarborough -- the most progressive politician ever elected in Texas IMHO (RIP Jim Mattox and Oscar Mauzy and Ann Richards) -- was defeated by a conservative Democrat named Lloyd Bentsen in 1970. Bentsen a conservative, you say, with mouth agape?

The campaign came in the wake of Yarborough's politically hazardous votes in favor of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bentsen made Yarborough's opposition to the war a major issue. His television advertising featured video images of rioting in the streets at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, implying that Yarborough was associated with the rioters. While this strategy was successful in defeating Yarborough, it caused long-term damage to Bentsen's relationship with liberals in his party.

Bentsen's campaign and his reputation as a conservative Democrat served to alienate him not only from supporters of Ralph Yarborough, but from prominent national liberals as well. Indeed, during the 1970 Senate race, the Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith endorsed George H. W. Bush, arguing that if Bentsen were elected to the Senate, he would invariably become the face of a new, more conservative Texas Democratic Party and that the long-term interests of Texas liberalism demanded Bentsen's defeat. Nevertheless, later that year, Bentsen went on to win the general election when he was pitted against Congressman and future President George H. W. Bush. On election night, Bentsen beat Bush convincingly.

Closer to modern times, in 2006 and with a slate of populist statewide Democratic candidates almost unmatched in Texas Democratic Party history (mostly because none of the conservative, establishment Dems wanted to risk losing) a group of us like-minded progressives set out to transform the SDEC by electing some of our own and others screened by our group to the committee. That effort got sabotaged by several turncoats whom we supported. Yes, we progressives got played by a bunch of schemers who about-faced on their progressive not-so-bonafides. Among the evidence was their support for Boyd Richie, a small-town conservative as chairman of the TDP. And making sure he got re-elected in subsequent years and so on.

Not electing Glen Maxey TDP chair in 2006 was, in retrospect, another pivotal turning point missed; one more opportunity lost to move the TDP back from the right and more toward the left. To draw the distinction between the two parties clearly enough that the lowest of low-information voters could understand: that only one party was interested in helping the little guys and not the fat cats (or as we say today, the 99% and not the 1%, messaging the Occupy movement has helpfully provided).

Except that the Texas Democratic Party, as represented by the majority of the members of the SDEC, really aren't interested in doing that. Not if you're homosexual, or Latino, and rarely and only occasionally if you're African-American. Not so much if you oppose the death penalty, believe that marijuana should be decriminalized, or refuse to participate in the demonization of the economic refugees of our southern neighbor, or even enable their children to attend college as the residents of Texas and US citizens that they are.

The vast majority of the SDEC in short are moral cowards. They are too scared of Republican backlash against rural and conservative Democratic office-holders and candidates to stand up for the principles of social justice that the party platform has continually espoused. In other words they talk good and walk lousy.

When the game is on the line, the Texas Democratic Party's so-called leaders turn tail and run into the locker room to take a dump, missing the game-changing play on purpose. Because they are too afraid to risk losing, they keep losing. And they just don't seem to get that.

Now to be clear, it's easy to support progressive Democrats; I just organized a meeting yesterday in Houston for one. It's not so easy -- and growing increasingly difficult -- to support a party, and some of its candidates, who aren't.

This kind of institutionalized timidity just drives me farther and farther away from the Democratic Party as a 'member of the tribe'. Which is why it's a good thing there's a political party on the ballot in 2012 that stands for something and is willing to stand up for it when push comes to shove.

I encourage Texas progressives and independents who feel as disgusted with those Texas Democrats who refuse to go on record supporting progressive values to consider supporting a party and its candidates who will. Supporting Green Party candidates is, at this point, perhaps the last chance that progressives will ever have in order to get the Democratic Party's attention with respect to making progress in Texas. In the proper direction, not the right one.

Related reading:

jobsanger: Texas Democratic Leaders Vote to Have No Beliefs

Juanita Jean -- whose husband serves on the SDEC and voted in favor of all of the resolutions: The Resolutions (UPDATED) (REUPDATED)

Mean Rachel: What Texas Democrats Can Learn From Aaron Pena

Collin County Democratic Blog News: The Texas Democratic Party Needs a New Direction. Besides its other cogent observations and suggestions, this post has an excellent summary of the history of the conservatives in the Texas Democratic Party.

The Weekly Wrangle

2011-12-05T06:56:00.000-06:00

As it brings you this week's blog round-up, the Texas Progressive Alliance thinks that if Herman Cain had just married all those women, he could be where Newt Gingrich is today.

Off the Kuff provides a little perspective about redistricting and the political outcome of the ongoing litigation over it.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson says it's time for a new direction for the Texas Democratic Party: A tremendous opportunity to create a new Democratic Party in Texas.

McBlogger says that Judge Jed Rakoff threw a big wrench into the sweetheart deals some of the banks have been getting from the SEC.

Bay Area Houston has the information if you want to contact the judge about state representative Joe Driver's sentencing.

Refinish69 at Doing My Part for the Left has a few suggestions since The Holiday Season is Here!

BossKitty at TruthHugger is more comfortable with crop circles than the Frankenstein-like Tea Party the Koch Brothers created: Why the Tea Party is like a Crop Circle.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw summaries the choices presented by the Republican presidental hopefuls in An OOPS, a Serial Flipper Flopper, Adulterers, a Sourpuss and a Scared Spin Doctor. It would be funnier if it weren't all true.

Mitt Romney's path to the GOP nomination got considerably rockier in the past week, and that was before Herman Cain failed to deliver in 30 minutes or less. The rise of Newt Gingrich is however a dilemma for conservative fundamentalist Christians, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs observes. Can they get behind a nominee who believes that marriage should only be between a man and a woman who does not have cancer?

Neil at Texas Liberal took a walk along some railroad tracks in Houston. On his walk, Neil encountered both solid and metaphorical aspects of life.

Sunday Funnies

2011-12-04T06:18:00.000-06:00

600,000 Texas voters may not have photo ID

2011-12-02T08:16:00.000-06:00

That's the entire population of Vermont. Or Wyoming. That's just one of about a dozen salient points in this piece by Rep. Rafael Anchia at NewsTaco, and it's so good I wish to repost it here in its entirety. Emphasis his.

November has been month full of “oops” moments for Texas Republicans.

Not only were their illegal maps redrawn by a San Antonio Federal court last week, but lost in the redistricting news was the story about the refusal by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pre-clear the strict photo ID legislation that Texas Republicans passed during the 2011 legislative session. Since July of this year, the DOJ has twice asked the Texas Secretary of State’s office (SOS) for additional information, including the number of registered voters who may be unable to comply with its requirements. At issue are about 600,000 registered Texas voters who may not have a state-issued license or ID. If the SOS does not provide the data, implementation of the bill can be halted.

For those not familiar with the term “pre-clearance,” it means that, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, changes to Texas’ election laws must be reviewed to ensure that the laws do not have discriminatory effects. Immediately following the end of last session, several voting rights advocacy groups sent letters to the DOJ stating that the new law will disenfranchise many Texas voters, including seniors, college students, the disabled, and ethnic and racial minorities. The restrictive nature of the bill defies common sense. For example, a college student in Texas who holds an out-of-state driver’s license, but is registered to vote on campus will not be able to use that driver’s license or even their college photo ID to vote. Even worse, a Korean war veteran who no longer drives and does not have a government-issued photo ID such as a valid passport or concealed handgun license will not be allowed to vote with their voter registration card, despite the fact that his service to his country was supposed to ensure that very right for his fellow Americans.

I have always argued that any photo ID law contain vote-saving provisions ensuring no duly-registered Texas voter is left behind. In Idaho, among the reddest of red states, the photo ID law allows duly registered citizens without photo ID to issue an affidavit under penalty of perjury in order to vote. In Florida, the Republican photo ID law allows voters without photo ID to cast a ballot that undergoes a signature match (like we do with mail-in ballots in Texas). During the debate on the House floor, I offered amendments based on these models, but they were rejected.

At the risk of saying, “I told you so,” it comes as no surprise to those of us who predicted that the DOJ would take issue with the more onerous provisions of this legislation. During the house debate, I also offered an amendment that would have delayed enactment of the strict photo ID law until the SOS had furnished the very type of data that the DOJ is requesting today. Disturbingly, no voter impact analysis had been conducted and, during the debate on this bill, I introduced studies suggesting that between 150,000 and 500,000 registered voters in Texas do not have the kind of photo ID that would be required to vote. As it turns out, I was too conservative in my estimates, and in fact we now know that up to 600,000 Texans may not be able to cast a regular ballot under the new law.

You would think that, before pushing for this legislation, the authors would have asked how the bill adversely affects Texans’ right to vote. What was their acceptable threshold for disenfranchisement? Was it 100, 100,000, or 600,000 Texas voters? To put 600,000 voters in context-that’s about the number of people who live in each of the states of Vermont and Wyoming. It seemed as though Texas Republicans never really wanted to answer that question. Despite the studies predicting that the bill would adversely affect the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Texans, undoubtedly among them thousands of Texas Republicans, the authors of the bill simply ignored these inconvenient data points.

Some have suggested that Texas Republicans knew about the 600,000 voters all along and this is a cynical and manipulative ploy to maintain partisan control of state government. I have a great deal of respect for many of my colleagues, including the bill authors, and would like to think otherwise, but the restrictive nature of the bill just doesn’t make sense.

What has become clear to me is that this legislation is not intended to deal with voter fraud — in fact, the only kind of voter fraud that regularly occurs, mail-in ballot fraud, is not touched by the photo ID legislation. A multi-year investigation by the Texas Attorney General has borne out that impersonation of a voter at the ballot box is extremely rare in the state of Texas. The real problem is not voter impersonation, it’s that too few people are voting. In the 2010 mid-term general elections, Texas was dead last among the 50 states in registered voter participation.

As legislators, we need to ensure that fundamental individual rights are protected. If the DOJ does not pre-clear the strict photo-ID bill, we will get another shot at this legislation. And if we do, we need to act carefully and can’t ignore the 600,000.

Romney's path to the GOP nomination

2011-11-30T05:32:00.003-06:00

... seems considerably more difficult today. And perhaps impossible.

He can't win the Iowa caucuses, now just a month away, and he may not win NH by much, or even at all. Then comes SC and FL.

But the larger point has more to do with whomever the Republicans select as their presidential standard-bearer, be it Romney or Newt Gingrich. A vital part of the conservative coalition, the Christian fundamentalists, increasingly have no candidate to turn to. Their Chosen One was Rick Perry, and he was replaced by Herman Cain as Flavor of the Month in October.

Personally my observation of the evangelicals is that they are less prone to bald-faced hypocrisy than the rest of the party. That translates into not 'forgiving a man who has repented his sins'. It seems that some can and some can't; they're divided. Never mind Romney's flip-floppery on every issue, it's Newt's nuanced positions on immigration and abortion that have them flummoxed.

For those who will never go to Mitt -- he's not a Christian, of course -- and who can't support Newt the Adulterer, it's a real quandary. The Tony Perkins/Richard Land caucus and its members have the potential to be the most disillusioned come next November. Just imagine how the Charismatics will react if the eventual nominee picks an anchor baby like Marco Rubio as a running mate.

Two hard-bitten conservatives on the ticket, likewise, alienates the "moderate" wing of the GOP, which has gone on the attack against Gingrich in recent days (note Karl Rove's consistent pimping of Romney on Fox News, to which even the likes of Michael Berry is reacting badly).

Either the Tea P is going to be very unhappy if Romney does stumble to the nom, or the establishment gets sour-pussed with the selection of Gingrich. Romney and a TeaBagger as V-P is nothing but a replay of McCain-Palin. Newt is NOT going to take a Jon Huntsman or Gary Johnson ... even though that would be a formidable matchup. He'll take a Latino/a and gamble that his softer immigration stance coupled with a brown token will win him Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and some other blue-in-'08 states. This political calculus disregards the dampening effect a (for example) Gingrich-Rubio ticket would have in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina ...

And this is exactly the kind of division between conservative factions that not only makes it increasingly likely that Obama wins, and wins easily*, but also helps Democrats down the ballot. And it could present the Democratic Party with electoral opportunities in places they would not normally exist even in a presidential election season ... such as in the South.

Maybe even, heaven forfend, Texas.

* no discounts factored in for worsening economic conditions, terrorist attacks, bad reactions to natural disasters, or fresh scandals

Update: Additional reading.

Can social conservatives forgive Gingrich’s messy personal past? Note this article's focus on the gender gap between evangelical women and men with regard to forgiving the Speaker's sins.

The Weekly First Frost Wrangle

2011-11-28T07:22:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance welcomes wearing a coat and gloves, condensing exhalation, and the opening of candidate filing season (SCOTUS willing) as it brings you this week's roundup.

Noted "redistricting analyst" Off the Kuff analyzed the new court-drawn Congressional map.

Lightseeker takes on the question of where OWS is now and what its future might hold. Check it out at Texas Kaos: OWS Meets Mass Democracy - The Need for a Narrative.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the recent failure (or was it?) of the so-called "supercommittee": Failure was a success.

Bay Area Houston wonders about Rep Joe Driver's felony and his $57,000 annual pension.

BossKitty at TruthHugger cannot stomach the ongoing civilian casualty toll in wars America propagates. Money talks, accountability walks. Quit electing politicians who answer to the military-industrial lobby and want to throw the rest of us under the bus: US and NATO Allies too sloppy for war.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is ashamed of the Texas Democratic Party. The only thing going for the party is that they're not Republicans.

Just one year ago, Texas Republicans were laughing all over themselves celebrating their super-majority in the House with the defections of Aaron Pena and Allan Ritter. They're not laughing any longer after two federal judges redrew the maps that erased all of their gains from 2010. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs notes that political fortunes can rise and fall just like the stock market, especially when pigs turn into hogs.

Neil at Texas Liberal noted that Occupy Houston published a newspaper. Occupy Houston and Occupy efforts across the nation are working hard and staying creative to make certain that the movement is here for the long haul.

WhosPlayin wrote about a Tea Party candidate for city council in Lewisville who is running on a platform of "rule of law" and "transparency", but who utterly failed at both in his campaign finance reports. But hey, at least this mistake is not as bad as his $56 million overstatement of the city's debt.

Sunday Slightly Funnies

2011-11-27T09:41:00.000-06:00

"Those that make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
-- JFK

Texas GOP fruits of 2010 turn bitter

2011-11-26T05:33:00.001-06:00

Texas Republicans in happier times.

Hard to believe that picture was taken just a year ago, isn't it?

That was the scene last December after the Red Tea Tide swept Republicans into a near-super majority in the Texas House, which Aaron Pena and Allan Ritter then gracelessly provided with their defections just days after the election.

Today, their grins have been turned into grimaces, their giddiness to dismay, their joy into depression.

Oh, they'll still be a majority in the statehouse (and nearly a super in the Texas Senate). All the new boundaries drawn by the three federal judges really do is restore Texas Democrats' electoral opportunities in 2012 to about the same 82-68 split that existed after 2008's election.

But the federal court's action -- specifically the majority of one Democrat and one Republican, both Latino -- virtually reverses the historic gains the TXGOP made in '10 ... which is why Aaron Pena is quitting, and why Greg Abbott is squalling like a colicky baby.

Earlier Friday, Abbott slammed changes proposed by the same federal panel to the congressional map in a legal filing, claiming the court overstepped its bounds. Abbott accused it of “undermining the democratic process.” [...]

“A court's job is to apply the law, not to make policy,” lawyers for the state wrote in their filing. “A federal court lacks constitutional authority to interfere with the expressed will of the state Legislature unless it is compelled to remedy a specific, identifiable violation of law.”

Abbott also said he would ask for the court to stay its congressional plan if it is not substantially changed.

If the judges refuse, Abbott said, he'll take the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now let's get the opinion of a competent lawyer.

“You have to show irreparable harm, and it's really pretty hard to show irreparable harm in an election,” said Michael Li, an elections law expert who has been closely tracking the redistricting trial. “The state's argument is the same argument that Democrats tried to use in 2004,” which the Supreme Court rejected.

While anything's possible with the partisan and blatantly unethical conservatives on the SCOTUS, expect them to be slightly outnumbered by the remaining five prudent jurists on the basis of the precedent Li cites.

Look again at the photo at the top of this post.

Pena is out on his fat ass, Abbott (left, lower) continues to disgrace himself with woeful legal strategies, Rick Perry (rear, over Pena's shoulder) has of course shit his presidential bed, and Joe Straus (right) will draw another conservative challenge to his speakership -- but likely survive it. Only David Dewhurst (over Pena's other shoulder) still has a little light shining on his political prospects, and that may yet be endangered by the Teabagger insurgent Ted Cruz in March's primary for the US Senate.

Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to heat up some turkey and dressing leftovers to have with my heaping bowl of schadenfreude.

Update: Rachel, not as mean as she could be, points out that Democrats need to focus on what matters, and that is electing Democrats who will stand up for Democratic principles.

We see examples of people unwilling to fight for things that Democrats should be fighting for all too often and make no real effort to replace them with people who are willing to fight. We saw an instance of it just last week in the SDEC's prioritization of protecting Democratic incumbents over civil rights; a decision so short-sighted that it makes one wonder what value there is in a committee that is more concerned about the state of the Democratic Party today than the state of Texas for future generations.

As previously referenced, I will have something to say about that as soon as the warm glow of thankfulness wears off.

"What's for dessert?" Funnies

2011-11-24T08:22:00.000-06:00

"If you want to make Joe Barton wet his pants ..."

2011-11-23T17:18:00.002-06:00

" ... just mention Chet Edwards." -- Matt Angle

The three-judge panel gave Texas Democrats an early Christmas present in the form of revised Congressional maps, and there's a lot to be thankful for.

The new map will likely give Democrats 13 House seats in the state, up from the nine seats they currently hold. It is also an improvement from the 10 likely seats Democrats would have gotten from the districts into which the Republican map had packed their constituents. [...]

The big winner in this proposal is Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas): the GOP map had tossed him into a heavily Hispanic district stretching from his home in Austin down to San Antonio. The new map draws a safely Democratic but not overwhelmingly Hispanic Austin district.

Rep. Francisco "Quico" Canseco (R-Texas) has an uphill battle to win reelection in his newly drawn seat. Canseco won a Democratic-leaning, heavily Hispanic seat running from San Antonio along the border almost to El Paso, and Republicans had sought to shore him up. The new plan makes the seat even more Democratic and Hispanic than the seat he currently holds.

Democrats are also dominant in two of the four new districts the state has gotten because of its population growth: a heavily minority district in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and a new heavily Hispanic seat in South Texas.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) could also be potentially vulnerable, according to Democrats. His district remains GOP-leaning but would have given President Obama about 45 percent of its vote. One candidate they'd love to see run: Former Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas), who represented part of Barton's new district when he was in the statehouse years ago.

Sissy Farenthold's Republican grandson is a goner:

Say sayonara to Blake "Ducky Pajamas" Farenthold in CD-27, the Republican who knocked off Solomon Ortiz in 2010. The 27th district is now 80.6% Hispanic and went for Obama in 2008.

One of the four new districts, in the Metroplex, will certainly be blue:

Note that CD33 is now a majority-minority seat in Tarrant County -- BOR notes that State Rep. Marc Veasey, one of the plaintiffs and strong fighters in these suits, has already indicated his interest in running for it. He’s already got an opponent if so -- a press release from Fort Worth City Council member Kathleen Hicks that announced her entry into the CD33 sweepstakes, hit my inbox about ten minutes after the publication of the new map. PoliTex confirms both of these. One way or another, though, it sounds like sayonara to Roger Williams.

Paging Nick Lampson:

CD14 is on the Gulf coast and includes parts of Brazoria, Galveston and Jefferson Counties. The district was formerly represented by Ron Paul, who has announced he won't run for reelection. While President Obama won just 41.9 percent of the vote, downballot candidates like Sam Houston (Texas Supreme Court) won 47.3 percent of the vote. Much of this district was represented by former Democratic Congressman Nick Lampson.

See the maps here for the state and here from Greg for the Houston area. Kuffner and Burnt Orange and the LSP, all linked above, have greater detail from their various perspectives. Stace picked up AG Abbott's fresh glass of whine, the Statesman details the Doggett-Castro separation, and the TexTrib adds a little more.

Here's to a very Happy Thanksgiving for everyone who isn't a Republican. *clink*

Blogging giblets

2011-11-23T06:52:00.003-06:00

Since Turkey Day came two days early for the Republicans, this year the Thanksgiving holiday is unofficially Festivus for the rest of us in November.

-- Tune out Black Friday and absolutely avoid its creeping back into Thanksgiving Day. If you must buy anything, buy it from a local merchant and not a corporation. That's an Occupy Wall Street objective even the most dense conservative ought to be able to understand.

-- I've written a scathing post on the cowardly actions of the Texas Democratic Party's Senate District Executive Committee, but I'm not going to put it up until next week (I'm trying to get in the holiday spirit). I may even temper its flames somewhat while it simmers. Nah, I probably won't.

-- I previously thought that Annise Parker was going to let HPD bust a move on Occupy Houston, but I don't think that any more. I believe now it is her strategy to allow officers to annoy the encampment with their obnoxious tarps-are-tents enforcement, hoping the protesters eventually get worn out and go away. This is likely what mayors in other cities are doing, taking a Thanksgiving week break and seeing if the weather -- cold, wet, or both -- will take care of their 'problem'. Pepper spray in the face just doesn't say Christmas, after all.

-- More after the holiday, somewhat regular posting on the weekend. Be nice to your Republican family members; most of them can't help it.

The Weekly Wrangle

2011-11-21T08:12:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progressive Alliance would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy Thanksgiving as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff takes a look at the electoral opportunities of the new court-drawn legislative map.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson links to the results of a Texas AFT survey that the GOP's plan to defund public education is working as designed: Survey says....Texas public schools are in trouble.

Bay Area Houston shows that while Rick Perry incorrectly claims Obama calls Americans lazy, his major donors are writing op-eds calling Americans lazy.

BossKitty at TruthHugger writes about political marketers that target the uninformed and disinterested voter with spicy one liners to vote for their candidate. The season of disinformation is upon us again: National Treasures and American History on eBay. And because the campaign gun debate is so twisted that the issue is totally missed: Lock and Load, Twist and Shoot.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that Rick Perry's success story means food insecurity for you.

The Texas Republican overreach in both redistricting and photo ID got slapped down hard by the feds. And the corresponding whining was louder than any two alleycats fighting over a female. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs celebrated Good Friday twice this year.

nytexan at BlueBloggin is disgusted with the police brutality and right wing lies of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Every day that OWS continues, more and more lobbyists, corporate giants and wrong-headed politicians reveal just how in bed they are with each other. It also reveals how para-military the police have become: Police Brutality And Corporate Lies Will Not Stop Occupy Wall Street.

Libby Shaw gets us up to date with the onging diaster that is Rick Perry's presidental aspirations this week. Check it out at TexasKaos: Rick Perry's Multiple Train Wrecks.

Neil at Texas Liberal ran his yearly how-to-thaw-a-turkey post. The post also offers links to cooking up a veggie Thanksgiving as suggested by PETA. Neil hopes everybody has a nice and safe Thanksgiving.

McBlogger takes a look at some 'conservatives' whose relationship with the truth could best be described as 'flexible'.

Sunday Funnies

2011-11-20T07:14:00.000-06:00

And this last one is just for Matt (see his comment in the prior post):

Greg Abbott scolds himself

2011-11-19T07:42:00.001-06:00

It was his strategy to bypass the DOJ and pre-clearance by going directly to court with the Republican redistricting overgrab. He thought the two GOP judges would be in their corner.

He was wildly wrong, and now he's bitching about the outcome.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office on Friday slammed an interim redistricting map proposed by a three-judge panel in San Antonio, saying the federal jurists overstepped their bounds in redrawing House and Senate district lines that could cost Republicans a half-dozen seats next year.

"Contrary to (a) basic principle of federalism, the proposed interim redistricting plan consistently overturns the Legislature's will where no probability of a legal wrong has been identified," Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, said in a statement.

The three-judge panel had to create the interim maps for the 2012 election because a trial in Washington, D.C., on whether the redistricting plans approved by the Texas Legislature this year conform to the U.S. Voting Rights Act will not take place until after candidates have to file for office.

Greg Abbott's view of the law is so warped that it consistently makes him a laughingstock.

Update: Burka.

Republican sources tell me that there is disgruntlement toward the attorney general among Republican House members. Their gripe is: The attorney general’s office had a “lackadaisical” attitude toward the case; or, alternatively, “Abbott didn’t have his A team on this.”

Abbott’s ballyhooed strategy was an attempt to win the case through forum-shopping. The AG’s legal team thought they had figured out how to wire around the Obama Justice Department, which was to choose the option of taking the case before a three-judge federal court in the District of Columbia and bypass a trial by moving for summary judgment on all the maps in controversy. The problem is, the two Bush appointees on the panel didn’t take a partisan position. [...]

One unexpected problem Abbott encountered at the San Antonio trial is that one of his own expert witness–John Alford, a political science professor at Rice University– went south on him. Alford testified that he would have done things differently from the Legislature’s congressional redistricting map that Abbott was defending...

I didn't realize how fundamentally incompetent and corrupt the man was until I worked on the campaign of the man who ran against him in 2006. Of all of the profoundly ignorant, nakedly raw partisan schmucks running the state of Texas -- from Rick Perry, John Cornyn, David Dewhurst, Kay Bailey, and David Dewhurst trickling all the way down to Susan Combs, Jerry Patterson, and Todd Staples -- Greg Abbott is the worst. And the most dangerous.

You can be certain that Abbott will do everything he can to subvert the will of the federal court which slapped away his party's overzealous gambit for permanent super-majority status.

On the other hand, one of the conservative cabal's junior partner in Houston, Paul Bettencourt, gets it. Almost:

"I don't think the Democratic Party could have hoped to have a plan drawn like this if they ~~controlled~~ had been able to participate in any meaningful way at the Legislature," said Paul Bettencourt, a former executive with the state Republican Party and former Harris County tax assessor.

Fixed it for ya, Quitter. That's pretty much what I said yesterday.

This will be how the statewide Republicans will run their campaigns in 2012: completely against Washington D.C., much like Rick Perry conducted his 2010 re-election. 'EEEvil, evil feds want to tell Texans how to live', blah blah blah. Dewhurst is already doing it. The "Obama/socialist,DemocRAT" rants will only get louder.

That tea is weak. And stale.

The Republican party declares that 'government doesn't work' and then demonstrates its premise on a daily basis. No jobs bill. No budget deal. No tax increases. No, no, all the time no.

No voting without your photo id, no pensions for anybody unless we can let Wall Street get their hands on it, no money for schools and teachers, no money for Planned Parenthood's birth preventive education.

And you get even more 'No' if your skin is brown, you are female, homosexual, and/or you're not a Christian.

But there's plenty of tax breaks for oil and gas companies who foul the environment and lots of great deals for crony capitalists. The better friend you are of Rick Perry's, or the more money you can give to Republicans, the better off you will be. It's the classic example of the 1% waging war on the 99%.

And the only reason to keep the focus on abortion and gay rights is to keep the ignorant and the poverty-stricken distracted. Distraction is, in fact, the primary tool in their toolbox. A president misleads America about the costs to get a prescription drug bill passed, paying off Big Pharma cronies to the tune of $1 trillion dollars? Republicans snooze. President exaggerates intelligence to fool Americans into going to war against Iraq, costing 4,800 American soldiers' lives and over $800 billion? GOP snores, snorts, and rolls over.

President accelerates a loan guarantee to Solyndra, loan goes bad costing $500 million? The tried-and-true faux outrage erupts.

You like this? Want more of it? Keep voting for these vile Republicans.

Texas Republican overreach slapped down hard by feds

2011-11-18T07:00:00.004-06:00

The maps drawn for the 2012 elections by the three-judge panel are a huge win, and in some cases are eye-popping.

Democrats could gain a half-dozen seats in the Texas House under an interim redistricting map a federal court released Thursday. [...]

The biggest changes in the proposed Texas House map, which was endorsed by two of the three judges meeting in San Antonio, appear to be focused in the Houston area and could cost the Republicans as many as three seats. Rep. Beverly Woolley's district was largely combined into Rep. Jim Murphy's, Rep. Ken Legler's reconfigured district is heavily Hispanic and Rep. Sarah Davis' new district was won in 2008 by President Barack Obama.

The two judges would also give Democratic state Reps. Hubert Vo and Scott Hochberg districts to run in, undoing the Legislature's combination of their districts. The U.S. Department of Justice said in a legal filing that combining the two districts violated the Voting Rights Act because it would reduce opportunities for minority representation.

Several Republicans got paired. Harvey K:

Under the House map proposed by the San Antonio judges, 12 districts will pair incumbents -- all Republican on Republican contests with the exception of two districts pairing an R with a D. No Democrats are paired in the interim map. It should also be noted that several incumbents on this list have either announced they are not running for re-election or running for a different office.

HD 2: Cain (R), Flynn (R)

HD 21: Hamilton (R), White (R)

HD 32: Hunter (R), Morrison (R)

HD 33: Scott (R), Torres (R)

HD 69: Hardcastle (R), Lyne (R)

HD 80: Aliseda (R), King, T. (D)

HD 85: Chisum (R), Landtroop (R)

HD 91: Hancock (R), Nash (R)

HD 109: Anderson, R. (R), Giddings (D)

HD 113: Burkett (R), Driver (R)

HD 114: Hartnett (R), Sheets (R)

HD 133: Murphy (R), Woolley (R)

Meanwile, here are the open House districts under the proposed interim House map:

HD 3, HD 14, HD 30, HD 35, HD 43, HD 57, HD 68, HD 88, HD 93, HD 101, HD 106, HD 107 and HD 136

Warrne Chisum is running for Railroad Commissioner, Will Hartnett and Beverly Woolley are retiring, and Joe Driver caught a felony indictment, so this isn't as bad as it looks at first blush for the Repugs.

More from Greg:

Some particulars of interest: Woolley’s old district (she’s retiring) is essentially folded into Jim Murphy’s. Scott (Hochberg) and Hubert (Vo) each have their own district. (Ken) Legler is toast. (Dwayne) Bohac would go another decade with a bullseye on his back. And HD134 (Sarah Davis) got bluer on the Obama numbers, so it looks like that one could come back to the D column. HD136 is outsourced to Waller County, so it’s a 24-district map for the county.

Even more impressive is a just-below 50-50 district in Fort Bend County that’s over 30% Asian. Beyond that, I’ve seen at least a couple of WD40 districts that might be regained. No time to get into Dallas, but I’m hearing three seats from there could come back.

And Wendy Davis gets her Senate district back.

All three judges agreed on what changes to make the Texas Senate map, essentially restoring the district represented by Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, to the configuration it had when she ran for election in 2008.

The redistricting plan transformed Davis' district, which was seen as heavily competitive, into a Republican-dominated district.

Frankly, I'm slack-jawed over these changes. If the Texas House had included Democrats in the cartographic process during the last session, the D's could not have done themselves this much good.

And Photo ID skids out of the turn and slams into the wall, bursting into flames:

The Texas voter ID law, one of Gov. Rick Perry's top priorities during the 2011 Legislature, has been stalled by the U.S. Justice Department, which is insisting on demographic information about voters that state election officials say is virtually impossible to provide.

Texas Republicans expressed dismay Thursday after Justice Department officials said they need voter information about race and ethnicity before they can approve the controversial law, which is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2012.

The ruling raises the possibility that the law will not be in place by the March 6 primary.

Information that Texas election officials have provided "is incomplete and does not enable us to determine that the proposed changes have neither the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or membership in a language group (required under the Voting Rights Act)," T. Christian Herren Jr., chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section, said in a Wednesday letter to Texas elections director Ann McGeehan.

Cue the whining.

The requested information will be virtually impossible to gather, said state Rep. Patricia Harless, R-Spring, House sponsor of the voter ID bill, SB 14.

"I am disappointed," she said. "I don't know that the Secretary of State can provide the information in the format that they want. I am not sure that we will be able to satisfy them. I think it's ridiculous."

World's tiniest violin playing beside the River of Tears and all that.

"I am pleased that DOJ is asking the probative questions, which indicates they suspect the real issue is voter suppression," (state Sen. Rodney) Ellis said.

That's MY Senator. More in brief from TPM. Charles' rejoinder is best:

It’s amusing that the DOJ slapped down the SOS again the same week that Republican State Rep. Patricia Harless, who had said that the DOJ’s initial request for more data was “reasonable” and that the SOS should be able to respond quickly, published a lame pro-voter ID op-ed that essentially boiled down to “it won’t suppress as many votes as the critics say” and “it polls well”. I mean, Free Ice Cream Day would probably poll well, too, but that doesn’t mean it would be good public policy. Notably, Harless snuck in a bit about how voter ID would protect us from “fraud”, but nowhere in her piece did she document any actual examples of fraud that voter ID would protect us from. We all know the reason for that, of course, but then Harless can’t exactly come out and admit that the actual purpose of voter ID is to make it harder for some people to vote, as that might sound scary. But a discriminatory law by any other name would still discriminate.

Good Friday, everybody.

Occupy Dallas got their turn last night

2011-11-17T06:18:00.003-06:00

Here is a compilation of minute-by-minute updates from the Occupy Dallas encampment as scores of Dallas police officers moved in late Wednesday and early Thursday to evict the protest group. There was no violence and 18 protesters were arrested.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17

4:05a Dallas police arrested 18 Occupy Dallas protesters during the overnight sweep to close the organization's campground near City Hall. Dallas police planned a 10 a.m. news conference to discuss the operation. - Jason Whitely, WFAA

1:49a The police sweep of the Occupy Dallas campground appears to be complete. The peaceful operation took about 45 minutes. Many police officers are now leaving, but dozens will remain through the night.

Entire live-blog here, in reverse chronological order.

Same MO: middle of the night, media restricted, hyper-aggressive use of force.

I'm guessing that it's only a matter of time before Occupy Houston gets the police state treatment. HPD is just waiting on Annise Parker's authorization. And if this were happening in Libya, or Egypt, then people like John McCain would be imploring the United States government to intervene militarily.

Today is a day of action in New York, Houston, and around the nation. Even as Occupy comes in for criticism from previously sympathetic circles, the movement expands.

We are at a necessary evolution point in the Occupy movement. I say "necessary" for two reasons: one, because of the hard truth that cities around the nation simply cannot tolerate camping as a form of free speech, thus necessitating a response to "putting tents up" that is increasingly relying on tear gas, riot gear, and mass arrests.

Two, because they aren't listening. The government, Wall Street, the media: they simply aren't listening yet. Most press coverage revolves around which cities beat the holy hell out of which protestors on any given day or which senior citizen posed such a damn threat to the riot-gear-laden police that they needed to be pepper sprayed, but the underlying messages of income inequality, corporate corruption and a captured government are, unsurprisingly, still being stonewalled.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg (and other mayors around the country) doesn't want people camping in his park anymore. Fine, then: he will push the protests into taking another form. That's probably good for the movement, and probably going to be worse for him.

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

"When the mayor — and a mayor who's a billionaire, by the way — sends a police force to guard Wall Street and use force against peaceful protesters, that plays right into the hands of this movement's narrative," (Fordham University sociology professor Heather) Gautney said.

Only a small part

2011-11-17T05:03:00.000-06:00

... of what's twirling around in there.

De-Occupy efforts by cities will only grow the movement

2011-11-16T08:00:00.002-06:00

Dorli Rainey, 84, reacts after being hit with pepper spray during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday.

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

This is another reason why the Democratic Party won't see any benefit from attempting to co-opt the Occupy movement.

The FBI has so far failed to respond to requests for an official response, and of the 14 local police agencies contacted in the past 24 hours, all have declined to respond to questions on this issue.

But in a recent interview with the BBC," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned she was on a conference call just before the recent wave of crackdowns began.

"I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them."

I'm certain that every mayor in the nation, from Michael Bloomberg to Annise Parker, is thinking that Jean Quan is a real dumbass. Among the concerns that coordination is designed to address is the 'criminal element'.

Don't set a midnight deadline to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters — it will only give a crowd of demonstrators time to form. Don't set ultimatums because it will encourage violent protesters to break it. Fence off the parks after an eviction so protesters can't reoccupy it.

As concerns over safety and sanitation grew at the encampments over the last month, officials from nearly 40 cities turned to each other on conference calls, sharing what worked and what hasn't as they grappled with the leaderless movement.

A media blackout is also part of the coordinated strategy.

New Yorkers awoke to front-page stories and photographs in both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Coverage by the two papers was supportive of the mayor and the police actions but disparaging toward the protesters. An AlterNet reporter, arriving on the scene at 1:30am, shortly after the raid began, could get nowhere near Zuccotti Park due to police barricades (and was subjected to pepper spray while attempting to report on events). How did the friendly reporters gain their access? Was there advance coordination to allow certain media outlets access and block the rest? Why was press access restricted? Were some reporters' credentials confiscated? How will reports of unwarranted force on the part of police toward the press be addressed?

More on the constitutional implications of Mayor Bloomberg's actions here. Calling tarps that shield food and medicine from the weather a 'tent', which is 'illegal', appears to be part of the coordinated strategy.

A dispute over what constitutes a tent led to the arrest of an Occupy Houston protester Tuesday at a downtown encampment at Tranquility Park, members of the group said.

They said several Houston police officers came to the park about 2:30 p.m., ordering them to remove tarps that were covering tables.

Occupy Houston members said the tarps were only brought out because of Tuesday afternoon's rain.

Protesters said police told them that placing tarps across tables — even as a temporary measure to protect supplies from the rain — made it a prohibited tent.

Some of the protesters questioned the timing of the decision to send Houston police into Tranquility Park on Tuesday.

"They waited until it was raining when they knew everything was going to get damaged," Diedrich Holgate said.

In New York, police took knives and slashed the heavy-duty Army tents that OWS had brought in to shield demonstrators from the bitter winter on its way.

So besides exasperation, why are coordinated attacks occurring on Occupy encampments now?

(T)he timing's very interesting -- and, for some people, very convenient. The nation's expecting a deficit package from the undemocratic super committee, anticipating another possible free trade deal, and waiting to see whether Wall Street will go unpunished for its foreclosure crime wave. All that makes this a very good time for dissident voices to suddenly disappear.

Go to that link to read more about the coming Catfood Super Committee's austerity bargain, the Free Trade with Asia deal going down right now, and the Obama DOJ's immunity-from-prosecution agreement with the Wall Street gangstas. Probably a good time not to have angry people in the streets already when those things come down.

Or so they think.

The one good thing about the violent responses from police departments trying to put down the Occupy movement is that they will fail. Just as those same government crackdowns failed throughout the Middle East.

Violence against peaceful protestors brings even more people into the movement. This is the hydra of revolution; cut off one head and two more sprout. The more they try to knock it down, the stronger it will grow.

Occupy has already grown past the point where repression will stop it. The only thing that will stop the movement now is for those in power to address the issues that the people demand.

License plates and dog whistles updates and responses

2011-11-14T18:25:00.001-06:00

(This post originally appeared last August, and was OSD's rejoinder to Progress Texas' effort to prevent the Confederate license plate design from being offered among the options for vanity plates in the state. In light of the defeat of the proposal, I present Mark Corcoran of Progress Texas' response, received today via e-mail.)

We took (Open Source Dem's) criticism seriously because we believe that online actions, when done right and properly combined with earned media strategies and offline actions, can be extremely effective.

Over the last few months we collected 25,000+ petitions signatures and had 5,000+ people directly contact the TxDMV opposing the Confederate flag proposal, generating hundres of earned media stories. Last Thursday, the TxDMV unanimously voted down the Confederate license plate after previously being tied 4 - 4.

Johnny Walker, a board member who switched his vote from yes to no said - “I listened to the comments, the feelings and emotions of people before the board and what they think is best for the state.”

We understand that other organizations have given online organizing a bad name. We don't do actions to simply grow an email list. All of our actions have a purpose and goal - some are long term, some are short term.

Open Source Dem's original post from August 11 follows.

===========

Texas has privatized production and distribution of license plates. There is already a “Bonnie Blue Flag” vanity plate reminiscent, notably, of battle ensigns favored by Confederate regiments from Texas:

I do not know if neo-Confederate yahoos understand this and use the existing Texas plate as a signaling (or fund-raising) device. Most KKK and Aryan brotherhood types prefer the “Southern Cross” (figuring in the design discussed below) to the “Hardee Pattern” device (above).

More important may be the “T for Texas” series of plates. I think these may be a Tea Party, True the Vote, or Christianist signal. It may be used to raise funds not just for Rick Perry cronies but for a battery of far-right political organizations. The new license plate regime seems to be a multi-level marketing arrangement, probably not just outrageous but actually illegal.

Tacit communication -- dog whistles -- are a salient part of the "politics as war" practiced by the far right. This is very effective relative to the brain-dead Methodism of our state party, including Progress Texas' attempt to emulate the right-wing outrage machine in order to raise money. The Texas Democratic Party and its partners, allies, whatever in Austin are breaking any semblance of message discipline and cranking out "pink noise" with no coherence or effect at all. This is consuming precious resources on make-work for hangers-on in Austin and generating spam.

Fake petitions and non-binding referenda signal political weakness and indecision to potential Democratic voters, something else to waste their time and money. This is stupid on steroids.

(Ed. note: This is what OSD is referring to in the previous.)

Pink noise and a mish-mash of campaign finance and non-profit enterprise are really dangerous in the hands of people with little proficiency in anything but bipartisan cronyism.

BIRGing and CORFing (but not with our politicos)

2011-11-14T10:30:00.001-06:00

A crowd of Penn State students in school sweatshirts huddled together near an old university building to listen to a call for unity, healing and peace. They wiped away tears, rested their heads on friends' shoulders and reflected on a week that stained the place many of them see as a second home.

"We are what makes the university thrive," said T.J. Bard, student body president, the day after his peers rioted in the streets to defend the firing of coach Joe Paterno. "And we are the ones who must restore glory to Penn State."

Why them? What happened on their campus wasn't their fault. Most didn't even know Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky and Matt McQueary. Usually in society, when something as horrific as child molestation happens, people around the alleged perpetrators cut all ties. They reject. So why not protest Sandusky preying upon children instead of rioting against the board for firing a football coach? Why not feel satisfaction in the punishment of an old guard that collectively made serious leadership errors, rather than oppose the rightful dissolution of a system that protected evil?

"If they were completely objective, they would say, 'These people did something terrible and I can't support them, I cannot be in their corner.'" says Dr. Don Forsyth, a psychology professor specializing in group dynamics at the University of Richmond. "But they aren't objective."

I've been amused by this oddity of "We won", "we're going to the championship game", "we are the champions" for a long, long time. The (fairly recent ) phenomenon of wearing jerseys to the game -- or to the bar to watch the game on teevee -- feeds into the ego-stroke.

You never hear "we lost", or "we choked", it's always "they".

What's happening to the students in Happy Valley is a common psychological phenomenon. The rest of the country watches the students and thinks they're missing the point. But in the students' minds, the story is happening to them. After all, "We are Penn State."

Social psychologists use two terms: BIRGing and CORFing -- Basking in Reflected Glory and Cutting off Reflected Failure. In the first, fans of a football team, for example, want to identify with the players' success. Decked out in team gear, they'll say, "We had a great win. We were awesome," when in reality the fans had no part in the win. Cutting off Reflected Failure happens when a team makes a mistake or loses, and fans blame it on an external factor to distance themselves from the defeat. "The refs were biased. The weather's bad." The true blame doesn't lie with the team.

"This is clearly a case of collective identity," says Dr. Forsyth of the Penn State reaction. "Students leave home, leave their family and they want to identify with their school. Their school has always been a place of tradition and honor, and that has been tarnished. So when they lose that identity, they panic."

And the cognitive dissonance gets worse.

Many students see JoePa as a victim, and their strong identity with him means they feel like victims, too. So they blame the media or the legal system. Is it a coincidence that the only real material damage from the riots was an overturned TV news truck? Respected ESPN reporter Tom Farrey said he was hit by a rock.

Most of us can't truly relate to the most important part of this story; the part that really has nothing to do with football. The part with the kids whose lives have never and will never be the same after such abuse from adults they were supposed to be able to trust. The part with the parents who couldn't save their children from sexual predators. But when you're 18 or 19 years old in State College, football is what you see everywhere around you and abuse (and the victims' faces) are hidden.

"Football runs the social life, it's all about football," Forsyth says. "It's the major source of everything that happens there.

"The actual crimes are very distant from them."

That atmosphere, thankfully, did change fairly quickly ... by gametime Saturday.

Student leaders came together to support victims of sexual abuse by wearing blue ribbons to Saturday's game and selling T-shirts to raise money for the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Prevent Child Abuse America Organization. PSU and Nebraska students joined in prayer before the game.

Not fast enough for some, though. The judge who ordered Jerry Sandusky released on unsecured bail turns out to be a volunteer in the Second Mile charity. And here's where the conversation pivots to politics.

I’m 31, an Iraq war veteran, a Penn State graduate, a Catholic, a native of State College, acquaintance of Jerry Sandusky’s, and a product of his Second Mile foundation.

And I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation.

That's a handful of institutions that have failed his generation right there.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts. But our leaders then, as now, seemed more concerned with flattery. Then -House Majority Leader and now-convicted felon Tom Delay told us, “nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.” Not exactly Churchillian stuff.

Those of us who did enlist were ordered into Iraq on the promise of being “greeted as liberators,” in the words of our then-vice president. Several thousand of us are dead from that false promise.

We looked for leadership from our churches, and were told to fight not poverty or injustice, but gay marriage. In the Catholic Church, we were told to blame the media, not the abusive priests, not the bishops, not the Vatican, for making us feel that our church has failed us in its sex abuse scandal and cover-up.

Our parents’ generation has balked at the tough decisions required to preserve our country’s sacred entitlements, leaving us to clean up the mess. They let the infrastructure built with their fathers’ hands crumble like a stale cookie. They downgraded our nation’s credit rating. They seem content to hand us a debt exceeding the size of our entire economy, rather than brave a fight against the fortunate and entrenched interests on K Street and Wall Street.

Now we are asking for jobs and are being told we aren’t good enough, to the tune of 3.3 million unemployed workers between the ages of 25 and 34.

This failure of a generation is as true in the halls of Congress as it is at Penn State.

With the 60 Minutes report last night that Your Congress has been trading stocks on insider information (which is illegal everywhere else in the country) you can only arrive at one conclusion: it's time to clean house.

And with the police crackdowns on Occupy encampments in Portland and Oakland last night and this morning, is there anybody still wondering what that is all about?

That would have been last week, of course. Next chance comes next year.

The Weekly Wrangle

2011-11-14T07:48:00.000-06:00

The Texas Progrogressive Alliance is beginning to think fond thoughts of cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and, um, something else it can't quite recall -- oops! -- as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff took a tour of Houston elections from the 1990s to see how they compared to more modern matchups.

Following Rick Perry's latest gaffes, Letters From Texas explains why the governor has become such a hopeless band nerd that the crazy girl who can't get a prom date pities him.

Darth Politico commemorates Veterans Day with a discussion about the history of red tape and veterans benefits. Emphasis on 'red'.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that Republicans in Texas are boxed in. They know know taxes must be raised to run our state's government, but can't bring themselves to say it, much less do it: Texas GOP's cowardice.

On the same night Houston Mayor Annise Parker celebrated barely being re-elected, a few blocks away the HPD arrested seven Occupy Houstonians for refusing to move a tarp which the police called a tent. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs doesn't think that's a great way to start a second term ... unless she plans on again representing the 1%, that is.

BossKitty at TruthHugger sees another disappointing campaign season. Inundated with Republican this and Tea Party that, BossKitty is embarrassed by what we are hearing in the post Republican Whack-a-Mole Misses the Point. Some economic guru is writing the script for each candidate to spout as the only way to get back on track, because it is always Obama's fault. We all know it was Obama's fault even before he was born. But some of the solutions totally miss the big picture.

Bay Area Houston is remembering on Veterans Day on how we continue to screw our vets.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that BP wants the government to hide data while celebrating the end of its cleanup responsibility. This week: crony capitalists 2, regular citizens 0.

Lightseeker at TexasKaos gives a brief summary of the GOP voter suppression campaign gearing up for 2012. Check it out: Voter Suppression Update 2011.

Neil at Texas Liberal attended an Occupy Houston press conference about OH participants arrested by Houston police for covering up electrical equipment with a tarp during a rainstorm. If only Occupy efforts across the nation had the same First Amendment protections as large anonymous corporate political donations enjoy under the Citizens United case.

Sunday Brutal Funnies

2011-11-13T08:25:00.000-06:00

Let's really honor them this year

2011-11-11T11:11:00.002-06:00

Let's bring them home, give them jobs, take care of their medical needs, and above all only put them at risk when it's absolutely necessary.

A picture is worth a thousand words but actions speak louder than that.

At the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month

2011-11-11T07:55:00.002-06:00

In the eleventh year.

Stand with Occupy Houston and the 99% on 11/11/11 for a peaceful student walkout and celebration of global resistance at Tranquility Park!

We call on University of Houston students to meet in front of the library building at 11:00am. At 11:30am we march to Tranquility Park in downtown Houston for a day of solidarity and celebration of global protest movements. The festivities start at 2:00pm in the park!

From 2:00pm to 5:00pm we’re holding discussion circles in the park. All topics are up for chat, but we plan to discuss:
health care
the homeless
taking care of our veterans
spirituality in collective movements
occupation ideology

Don’t limit yourself to these! Tighten your thinking caps and lets talk about the issues that drive our movement. At 5:00pm we’ll open it up and celebrate art and poetry. We’ll have an open mic, so come on out and rap, sing, or perform. [...]

11/11/11 is a national day of solidarity, and we welcome everyone! We are the 99% and we are finally making our voices heard!

On Friday, November 11, 2011, the City of Houston will show support of our Armed Forces as we celebrate the 13th Annual Houston Salutes American Heroes Veterans Day Commemoration and Parade.
The ceremony begins at 10:00 a.m. on the steps of City Hall. The American Heroes Parade will follow at 11:30 a.m.

• Free parking in the Theater District Parking Garage from 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. (.pdf)

• 2011 Event Press Release (.html)

11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. AT&T Veterans Job Fair ... The job fair booths are free for hiring companies. Please contact Susan Bono at susan.bono@houstontx.gov.

11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. Walgreens Veterans Health Fair

Friday Brain Fart Funnies

2011-11-11T07:20:00.000-06:00

Hey, y'all ... two outta three ain't bad. Cut the guy some slack.

Brains and Eggs

San Antonio judges mull later date for TX primary

Not-so-much 'Stros

Houston progressive events on tap this week

Judges deciding TX redistricting feel deadline pressure, pass it down

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

The South Carolina subheadlines: Colbert, Cain, Santorum and Paul

SCOTUS tells lower court: Start over on TX maps

Occupy the Courts today

Cleaning up the Octagon after the fights

Happy Trails

Paula Deen, diabetes, and Novo Nordisk

Obama denies KXL's permit; work on pipeline continues

Thank you, Lamar Smith.

Debate audience boos Romney's Mexican heritage

MLK Day linkage

MLK Day Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

Ron Paul, Ted Cruz win Texas TP straw poll

Texas Tea Time this weekend (and more minority reports)

Republicans activate self-destruction sequence

SCOTUS hears arguments about TX redistricting, leaves us guessing

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

Rick Santorum on pre-existing conditions

Texas redistricting case hinges on legal precedent

Republicans in turmoil following Iowa

Spinning class in session

First Weekly Wrangle of 2012

Auld Lang Syne Funnies

New Orleans for (in-between) the holidays

More Dallas bath and toilet water headed for Houston

The Last Weekly Wrangle of 2011

Season's Greetings from the cartoonists

Only Romney and Paul make VA primary ballot

The House Republican cave-in and Keystone XL

Look! The GOP finally found some voter fraud!

Two Christmas presents for the environment

A third party you can disregard: Americans Elect

Something reeks in the Harris Co. DA's office

Paul Sadler to run for US Senate

T'was the Week before Christmas Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

Your Christmas gift is that there will be no more debates

Roundup of some highly readables

Third-party presidential candidate news

Anti-incumbent fever sweeps out city hall

Occupy the Port of Houston today

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

Supreme clusterfudge

David Stern really is trying to kill the NBA

Occupy Congress today, Occupy the Gulf next Monday, Dec. 12

Kristi Thibaut and Jolanda Jones for Houston City Council

The cowardice of the Texas Democratic Party (or how I turned Bluish-Green)

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

600,000 Texas voters may not have photo ID

Romney's path to the GOP nomination

The Weekly First Frost Wrangle

Sunday Slightly Funnies

Texas GOP fruits of 2010 turn bitter

"What's for dessert?" Funnies

"If you want to make Joe Barton wet his pants ..."

Blogging giblets

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Funnies

Greg Abbott scolds himself

Texas Republican overreach slapped down hard by feds

Occupy Dallas got their turn last night

Only a small part

De-Occupy efforts by cities will only grow the movement

License plates and dog whistles *updates and responses*

BIRGing and CORFing (but not with our politicos)

The Weekly Wrangle

Sunday Brutal Funnies

Let's really honor them this year

At the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month

Friday Brain Fart Funnies

License plates and dog whistles updates and responses